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Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 15, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What type of note keeping app do you use, if any? I recently started using Notion for work and I'm slowly grasping the possibilities. I'm also looking at using Obsidian in my personal life.

Any thoughts on how to use these tools effectively?

What type of note keeping app do you use, if any?

vim to take notes, git to save/distribute them, grep to search them, ssh to get to them from my phone if I'm away from a laptop or workstation.

Any thoughts on how to use these tools effectively?

In my case? Already be an expert with them for other use cases, so there's no extra learning curve involved.

I could go into more specific details, but I fear my readers might be less interested in "how to use these [particular] tools effectively" and more fascinated with me as a potential counterexample to the "opinion of someone with extensive life experience will carry more weight for me" heuristic @Southkraut just commented above. Sometimes "life experience" just means "figured something out from scratch decades ago and too stubborn to start over from scratch now", sometimes "children of his own" just means "short rations of free time".

Ahh to be a programmer. You truly are the ubermensch of our times.

Everything he mentioned sounds less like programming and more like "slightly more advanced than average power-user/admin/console tools".

Also, "tools which aren't very good for taking notes". git is useful for programming but using it to save your notes is jamming a square peg into a round hole. And vim shouldn't be used for anything ever (yeah I said it, fight me vi fanboys).

As a fellow vim hater, you might like this talk. I don't agree with everything, but the general idea that "some things in programming are just relics of the past and we don't get rid of them because of inertia and sometimes machismo" is a good point to keep mind.

For me, vim squarely fits in that category. Yes I could learn how to do kung fu with my keyboard, but 90% of the time I am programming, I am googling or staring at the screen trying to figure out wtf to write, Real time savings could be achieved if I could come up with a solution faster, not type faster.