It’s been several months that I switched to a Linux distro and left macOS behind me. It may look like I needed to take a break, try a little thing to procrastinate a bit more use a real keyboard (ಠ‿ಠ), and then come back. No, it was really a thing. The OS I have been loving for quite a few years – 15 years, for what matter, is probably going in the wrong direction. Riccardo Morri will have more to say than me:
The utter user-interface butchery happening to Safari on the Mac is once again the work of people who put iOS first. People who by now think in iOS terms. People who view the venerable Mac OS user interface as an older person whose traits must be experimented upon, plastic surgery after plastic surgery, until this person looks younger. Unfortunately the effect is more like this person ends up looking… weird.
I can’t tell because I no longer update my Macbook (still on Mojave, FWIW), but how Safari will look like in the upcoming release of Monterey (what a name, really!) is pretty awful. I really don’t feel like I would like to use my personal computer as the iPhone I use since 15 years. Really? Is this something like the dream of the tablets of the 2010s that has never came to life?! Seriously, Apple… Of potential interest too: Apple Is Now an Antifragile Company.
Neovim is a terrible thing, seriously. Now that I upgraded my config, I came close to 60 ms of startup time, as before with a plain VimL config. I still miss polyglot a little bit, but the benefits are so huge: As described in my series of Neovim-related blog posts, I got a fuzzy finder, LSP stuff and completion at no cost by just switching to the nightly version of Neovim and installing a few plugins. I don’t need really more since I prefer to use builtin commands. And since I’m not a huge fan of syntax highlight, I don’t really mind if some languages (e.g., Lisp) are not as well handled as they were previously. This really is a big deal compared to Emacs. Now I can really write text or code, just text or code, and don’t worry about anything lees. I keep finding interesting blog posts along the way, yet my RSS list includes more Emacs-related sources than Vim ones.
By the way, I stopped using Kitty and switched back to Gnome Terminal. The latter doesn’t support splits, nor ligatures, but that’s okay I guess, especially given that I can rely on Tmux to solve the first issue. I can switch to fullscreen mode as easily as when using Firefox, using F11, once the shortcut is properly defined (actually, it was defined as S-Up for me). This may seem a little bit odd, but the top bar in Gnome shell look really huge, compared to the desktop menu bar, and sometimes I feel like I just want to use the whole screen, disregarding the menu bar with time and notification list. Well, I mean, unlike Riccardo I may just worry about every pixel, whether it concerns the vertical or horizontal axis (but I never end up with more than 6-8 tabs opened in my web browser).
For the time being, I’m on holidays, and before I leave my apartment to get some fresh air for a few days, I’ll keep reading rants on Reddit (last one was Rant: Neovim is less productive than VS Code), new blog posts but also older ones like A Road to Common Lisp, Python VS Common Lisp, workflow and ecosystem. I also have a pile of technical and recreational papers and books to read for when I’m back.