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Oliver Burn
Oliver Burn

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My toolchain changes in 2020

This page describes the changes I made to my toolchain in the last year. True to my writing style, this will be short and (hopefully) sweet.

The changes in (roughly) decreasing significance:

  1. Switched to using Zsh along with the Oh My Zsh framework. I have used Bash for about 30 years, so this was not done lightly. The killer plugin is zsh-autosuggestions, which provides Fish-like suggestions. Very addictive.

  2. Moved away from Firefox to the Vivaldi Browser. It took a bit of getting used to, but it seems to come with almost all the plugins/extensions that I require built in. The Quick Commands capability is excellent. I feel a bit sad as I realise that this is just Google Chrome re-skinned.

  3. For my personal machine, I switched to running Fedora Linux, as I have a love/hate relationship with Ubuntu. So far I am coping just fine, and it feels more developer friendly.

  4. I learnt to use the Org Capture extension for Vivaldi/Chrome and Firefox. This was a game changer for me at work, as I can use it to track what web pages I need to review. I use Org Mode to run my work life.

  5. I switched to Counsel from Helm. I was motivated when Helm was discontinued for a short period of time, and I found that Counsel felt faster and worked for my use-cases. Note, I have not found a replacement for helm-org-rifle to search my Org files.

  6. I learn to use the Hydra package to create my own contextual menus in Emacs.

  7. I use Ledger for tracking my finances. This year I embraced using the reporting capabilities in ledger-mode, which dramatically improved my work-flow.

That's it.

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