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Minimalist Software

I've been on a major minimalism kick these past couple of months. While I was searching for minimalism in blogs on marginalia search, I came across, first, the gentoo wiki for software minimalism, then the suckless website.

This is before I learned they were nazis. ah well.

Still, the idea of software minimalism is an appealing one to me - I can be picky about how I like my computer to work, so having software that is small enough for me to understand the whole thing (load it into memory, as it were) makes it easier to mold it into what I want it to be. On the other hand, there are often cases where I don't have a specific idea of what I want from software, or I'm not committed enough to a particular task to pursue coding something to do it exactly the way I want. In these cases, I can question whether I want software minimalism or software simplicity - and those aren't always the same thing.

An example is my to-do list. I keep my immediate to-dos on my paper calendar, but I like to use software to maintain a backlog so that I can reorganize/remove tasks as inspiration comes and goes. I've tried a couple different softwares for this: taskwarrior, vimwiki, and Getting things GNOME! Vimwiki is by far the most minimalist of these - it literally saves the to-dos as a text file. Which works, but I'd like for altering and archiving tasks to be a bit smoother. Taskwarrior is the next step up - a CLI program that has functions for archiving, listing, completing, pruning, etc. But that runs into an ease-of-use issue - how do I view tasks for a specific tag, or change the urgency of tasks, or anything at all? I have to learn the specific syntax that taskwarrior uses. It's incredibly powerful, I'm sure, but it takes time to learn. GTG, by comparison, is a GUI application, and that comes with a certain amount of usability that CLI just can't match. Need to add a task? click the plus button. Delete? click the task and press del. The context menu will help you do most other things, and show you the keyboard shortcuts along the way. It's not as minimalist as vimwiki, but it's far simpler to use.

In other words, do I want software that's minimal in terms of only having essential functionality, or do I want minimal in terms of overhead needed to use the software? It's an interesting point of tension for me - I care about lean computing, power use, maintainable programs, and the like, but I also don't want everything I do with a computer to require learning a new command syntax. Part of the reason I'm so attracted to minimalism in my physical life (if not necessarily my digital life) is that I feel like it brings simplicity - with less stuff in it, my place is easier to clean and keep tidy, which helps me to feel less stress. Minimalist software sometimes goes past the point of simplicity that attracts me to minimalism as a whole. I like it as a project to tinker with, but I don't know if I'd want to use it as a component of the greater-scope minimalism of my life.