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+title: *nix workflow after nearly a decade (raw braindump)
+date: 2026-04-13 12:00
+---
+
+I was asked a few times from members of my university's cybersecurity
+club (I was a former e-board member and it's my main club) over the
+past months of how I use a computer since apparently how I use it is
+different from how others do it. They also found it fascinating that I
+used Linux/*BSD for as long as I did, and I'm probably among very few
+others if any at my university that used it for like 9.5 years. It's
+organized in what got me into this in the first place, my OS-hopping,
+my editor-hopping, what my current workflow is, and my (maybe lack of
+meaningful) thought process behind each switch. The TL;DR of that is
+I'm like a purist (primarily with the UNIX philosophy) and minimalist
+(reducing "bloat" as much as possible) and that guided a lot of my
+decisions up till now at the end of college. Any mistakes I made or
+any "cringe" I did like being a 4chan `/g/` kid can be blamed on me
+being 12/13 at the time. The following is the raw braindump before I
+condensed it into point form.
+
+---
+
+I was introduced to Linux via Luke Smith's early video on why use
+terminal programs. Then by watching his other videos, I got introduced
+to stuff like different kinds of distros (he used Parabola at the time
+and Parabola's wiki in 2017 hadn't removed the beginners guide page
+unlike Arch wiki, though in hindsight they're basically the same),
+tiling window managers (i3, dwm), suckless movement and minimalism
+(was the start of me obsessing over purism even to my detriment
+sometimes as in spending too much time that I miss deadlines), using
+LaTeX for documents and presentations, etc. This was during his early
+days back in 2017 and 2018, before he quit being a linguist professor
+in Georgia and moved to a cabin in Florida and now complains about les
+youths. I didn't watch other Linux-related channels until more
+recently with David Wilson's System Crafters for Emacs and Guix (more
+on this at the very end, it's a recent change that fundamentally
+changed how I do stuff, this will come up a lot).
+
+This put me on the path of both distro-hopping and
+WM-hopping. Reminder that I started this journey when I was 12
+(now 21) so I had lots of time on my hands. I started with Parabola
+and then switched to Arch shortly after for wifi drivers, then setup
+Gentoo through reading its handbook to learn about Linux more, and
+then later did a full LFS+BLFS twice, then CRUX, Sabotage, KISS,
+Alpine, and then switched between them depending on what little thing
+annoyed me at the time. Of these, CRUX really made me feel at "home"
+with giving me just enough packages for a minimal base and I liked
+being a package maintainer for a short while. I found CRUX through
+z3bra on the nixers.net forum talking about the differences between it
+and Gentoo. Sabotage (the way it did stuff was unique and interesting
+to me at the time but only used for one hop) and KISS (what I wished
+CRUX was but because it didn't have the drunk tux mascot I didn't use
+it much beyond a couple hops) from people on IRC and XMPP. I learned a
+lot about system administration and writing my own packages through
+distro-hopping. Eventually, the choices converged to Arch (if I wanted
+something easy), CRUX (because it made me feel fuzzy inside), Gentoo
+(USE flags put me further on the path of purism, not as much need to
+maintain so many packages in my overlay unlike CRUX). I later also
+found out about the BSDs in my goal of more minimalism and purism. It
+being direct descendants of the venerable Bell Labs's Research
+UNIX. FreeBSD was what I wished Linux was and I liked its better
+documentation and integrated first-class ZFS support. OpenBSD I loved
+for its documentation, focus on security above all else, tight-knit
+and knowledgeable mature community (unlike with most of Linux),
+package management feeling more similar to CRUX, mascot, and being
+Canadian (patriotism I guess). Among the OSes I used the longest
+without hopping, CRUX, Gentoo, and OpenBSD are the ones I really
+used. I usually switched away from CRUX due to power user burnout from
+maintaining packages for adding and making them more minimal, same
+from Gentoo but to lesser extent due to many other overlays, and from
+OpenBSD for Windows virtualization at the time and gaming (though I
+did find out more about FOSS engines and did more retro emulation
+under OpenBSD). I also had a phase in high school grade 12 with
+plan9/9front. Really loved the simplicity and elegance of it. Its
+windowing manager rio/8.5 and acme editor also showed me that mice
+aren't an inherently bad thing for computer use when designed
+properly. I couldn't go further with dailying it because my i219-v and
+r8168 driver wasn't working properly even after I tried patching it
+with my then meager C skills. Later in college around junior year, I
+was peer pressured into NixOS from my functional programming
+friends. I liked the idea behind it and it made systemd somewhat
+usable, but I disliked the special snowflake DSL (they should have
+used something else as a base like Haskell or anything else they took
+inspiration from) and it liked pulling in all sorts of transient
+dependencies, the exact opposite of what I wanted in Linux since I
+started using it years ago. What really put me off more than transient
+deps was poor and inconsistent documentation (like pretty much nothing
+about flakes: there was a disconnect in documentation of what the
+broader community used and what upstream deemed stable). But, it had
+advantages like helping organize my system+home configs and dotfiles
+all in one place which was very nice. So I briefly tried Guix, but
+once again without knowing its language was hard to use and also
+trying to mould my existing suckless+vi non-emacs worklow into it was
+hard at the time. So I once again switched back and forth between
+Arch, CRUX, Gentoo, and NixOS despite their shortcomings I detailed
+earlier: my power user burnout or getting bored. Continuing later for
+recent switch to Guix+Emacs.
+
+So now about window manager choice. I started with i3 since that's
+what Luke Smith used and I was curious about how a keyboard-only
+workflow would look like. It's also what the most popular WM on
+r/unixporn was. Back in the day when pretty much every post there was
+either a close-to-default i3-gaps setup or bspwm instead of sway and
+hyprland now. I then switched to bspwm because it was more minimal and
+UNIX philosophy like where it split keybind handling into separate
+program sxhkd. I also used herbstluftwm, the manual tiling was
+nice. Then comes dwm, my main WM of choice for a long time since it
+blended minimalism with functionality and also by suckless so was
+elegant. However, I still did end up switching to spectrwm since it
+looked similar visually but I found it easier to config. According to
+my screenshots though, that didn't last for long. I think I only
+stayed on it for a few months before switching back to dwm. I did
+briefly try out sway to see if Wayland was really all that great, but
+ultimately switched back to dwm again, and only really used it when I
+felt too lazy to setup Xorg on a new system and not using my
+pre-existing configs. Again, continuing later for my recent switch to
+Guix+Emacs.
+
+Missing what editor I used is criminal for this kind of topic. Going
+back to before Linux, I used Eclipse for Java and Notepad++ for
+regular stuff, and then I think I used Atom for a brief period of time
+(VS Code wasn't out yet or something in 2016/17). I didn't do much
+programming back then, partly because getting dependencies and
+compiling anything is a pain if my experience with compiling aseprite
+(sprite editor with cmake buildsystem) was anything to go off of. When
+I started using Linux, I also started with Vim. Programs like it were
+what got me to switch in the first place. Turns out learning your
+tools is important (and that comes up a lot). Even back then I didn't
+like using much of the pre-made configs, they were bloated and harder
+to reason about as a new user since defaults were changed. Also had a
+brief stint with Emacs, but not knowing basic Lisp made it hard to
+"know" it and it was bloated (common joke is it's an operating system
+that lacks a good editor) and also not optimized on Windows (same
+config from Linux) where it was just noticeably more sluggish on muh
+gamin' laptop when running Win10 instead of like Arch or Gentoo. After
+learning Vim enough like how to move easily and basic ex commands, I
+of course wanted more minimalism. Had a nice time with vis and nvi,
+used them for a while. In my plan9 phase, I used acme briefly and
+learned a lot about sam through its manual, which also taught me how
+to use ed the standard text editor, which also taught me (basic) regex
+which I can't overstate how much better it made editing files in
+addition to vi motions.
+
+Finally, my current workflow and choices. It's now all based around
+Lisp and Scheme because they make me feel all fuzzy inside when
+learning it, just like I did when learning to use Linux in middle
+school and how to program in C. The propaganda that got me into using
+this now was when I heard about the Lispy Gopher Show when I was
+briefly on the Fediverse through Prahou (the author/artist of
+unix_surrealism from analog_nowhere). While I did briefly use Emacs in
+the past, I did not learn it properly. As in, not knowing Lisp meant I
+needed to look a lot of things up instead of just writing them
+myself. Technically with the vi-like editors, I also didn't write
+scripts in them nor needed to touch their config due to how minimal
+they already were by default and that regex+vi-motions going a long
+way and there being packages to bridge the remaining gap for
+integrations. But with Emacs, the parentheses I guess made it more
+daunting or something. This sort of mirrors what I did when I first
+got into Linux (well Arch) as I read a lot through its wiki. But
+compared to just regular system administration where you run a bunch
+of commands or even making your own distro via LFS, I guess properly
+learning an editor and its programming language was too much for me at
+the time. For new Emacs users, it was also recommended a lot that they
+use a pre-made opinionated config like Doom-Emacs or Spacemacs (neovim
+has a similar situation) and that really put me off since that felt
+like I would be learning instead how those work instead of the editor
+itself. Now that I know some functional programming through OCaml and
+to some extent Nix from a couple summers ago, learning Lisp and Scheme
+was actually much easier. Compared to using a vi-like editor, using
+Emacs seemed nicer for working with these kinds of languages since I
+can selectively execute parts of a program, simliar to something like
+Jupyter notebook without it being so web- and Python-focused and being
+an inefficient use of system resources. The main reason why I did not
+want to use Emacs previously was that it seemed like a monolithic
+kitchen sink of everything. I think it being described as an operating
+system within an operating system isn't too much of an inaccurate
+description. However, compared to Linux and Xorg proper where I tried
+following minimalism and the UNIX philosophy as much as I could
+(i.e. small, minimal, self-contained programs for a specific task),
+there was not much cohesion between them. At most, they'll have
+vi-keybinds and happen to use ncurses but the layout of everything
+looks different and configured with different syntaxes (e.g. mutt the
+mail client looks different from newsboat the RSS reader and different
+from lynx and links2). Meanwhile with Emacs, yes there are multiple
+packages and yes I'm not necessarily using POSIX shell scripts for
+connecting things together, but Lisp is a more powerful language than
+something like shell that depends on other programs (written in other
+languages) to do even simple stuff. With Emacs, I now have everything
+integrated into a single program, everything properly goes through
+text-based buffers, and as a result is even easier to integrate around
+because everything is primarily text. Also previously, some popular
+packages that people use also seemed like it may have contributed to
+Emacs's bloat in my point of view at that time like /needing/
+something like ivy or helm. There's better packages available that do
+the same thing now, like orderless (for fuzzy searching) combined with
+vertico (for the vertical complete menu that ivy gave), and consult
+for better autocomplete for various existing Emacs functions, among
+other stuff. Now it's my main editor since like last summerish, and I
+configured it to be my editor, Scheme programming via Geiser, Lisp via
+just Emacs (since for now I'm mainly using Emacs Lisp and not Common
+Lisp+SLIME) and using the eval-* functions a lot (for both Lisp and
+Scheme), document editing and task planning and habit tracking through
+org-mode (some people use Emacs just for org-mode since it's much more
+than just a markup language), email through notmuch+mbsync+msmtp
+(stayed pretty much the same except I'm using notmuch.el directly
+instead of through like mutt or aerc), RSS through elfeed, browsing
+primarily through eww (though I have to use qutebrowser for js-heavy
+sites like Canvas), document viewing through pdftools and docview
+instead of through mupdf (though for some larger PDFs like textbooks,
+mupdf is just faster but not needed for most of my PDFs), backgrounded
+programs through dtach and its associated emacs management package
+instead of tmux, gptel for interacting with my local LLMs running on
+my desktop through vllm, and finally as my X window manager via EXWM
+instead of dwm or any other WM I used to use in the past. Works well
+when playing games too like Elite Dangerous, Emacs doesn't get in the
+way.
+
+I know this was very ramble-y. I just braindumped since there's so
+much to cover and a lot of stuff to remember over the past 9 years
+that I couldn't think in a more organized way without having all of it
+written down. I probably missed some stuff, so any questions?
+
+---
+
+In the actual presentation, I missed mentioning my peripherals (a
+Ferris Sweep with Kailh Choc Ambient Nocturnal switches for laptop,
+Corne with Zealios Zilent v2 switches for my desktop, and a Ploopy
+Adept as my mouse for both) as well since that's also different from
+how most people use it, as well as my current project "X380", a modded
+stripped-down X280 (I'll make a post when it's more finalized after
+fixing my 3D printer).