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I've been silently undergoing a transformation over the last month.
These come in waves - one day I wake up and look back and realize that I hate what I am doing, and I can't even imagine how I liked it in the first place. Not to mention I don't understand it. And these days I don't have to deal with it at all, so I wind up loafing around, depressed, until I emerge - as a different person.
This has happened several times since my initial COVID-induced brainfog.
Is it personal growth? Maybe -- because as a part of this constipative process I come out lighter and equip myself with much more reasonable surroundings - lighter and easier -- be they people or computing tools.
Or maybe it is just mental illness, or progressive descent into dementia, where I learn to adapt to an ever-shrinking mental capacity.
I don't know.
For many years I've tried to switch to vim, -- conceptually, I've been sold on vim for well over a decade -- but because of Lisp I've been stuck in Emacs. There is a way to work with Lisp in Vim as well, but my attempts at it failed...
This round I just started using Vim. I am using it now. I suck at it - but to be honest, I know about 10 Emacs commands and never felt that I needed more. I know enough Vim to edit text, and whenever I find myself struggling I just look up the commands. I haven't looked up anything today, a good sign.
I also find myself really angry looking at my Xubuntu XFCE screen. The noise of all the crap on the screen is just deafening. I set up one of my two machines with the suckless tiling window manager, dwm, and after a day of struggling with it, am much, much happier.
I've considered tiling window managers before, but always chickened out. The idea of being limited to the few tiles was, for some reason, scary. I don't really know why, but it still is, though less so.
In practice losing all the icons and windows is a _huge_ win. All I need to see, typically, is a vim with maybe 3 files I am working with (in columnar split), a terminal to run crap, and a browser to read docs and such. That works out so much better in a tiled manager! And using keystrokes to switch between windows, maximizing some as needed, is incredibly fast!
And so, I tried dwm, and loved the quiet of it. Actually I tried i3 first, but I found it too noisy - configuring it and all. dwm has a header file, and just for the heck of it I added a couple of bindings, and recompiled it.
I can't believe that last week I had to reach for the mouse to switch to another window. Damn.
I can now look at the screen again without grinding my teeth. I do like the suckless thing.