(2022-04-04) Ford I Finally Reached Computing Nirvana What Was It All For

Paul Ford: I Finally Reached Computing Nirvana. What Was It All For? Like many nerds before me, I spent a goodly portion of my life searching for the perfect computing system. I wanted a single tool that would let me write prose or programs, that could search every email, tweet, or document in a few keystrokes, and that would work across all my devices

Where the software industry offered notifications, little clicks and dings, messages jumping up and down on my screen like a dog begging for a treat, I wanted calm textuality

The purpose of configuration is to make a thing work with some other thing—to make the to-do list work with the email client, say, or the calendar work with the other calendar. It's an interdisciplinary study.

unfortunately, configuration is indistinguishable from procrastination.

I spent almost three decades configuring my text editor, amassing 20 or so dotfiles that would make one acronym or nonsense word concordant with another. (For me: i3wm + emacs + org-mode + notmuch + tmux, bound together with ssh + git + Syncthing + Tailscale.)

A big problem I had was where to put my stuff. I tried different databases, folder structures, private websites, cloud drives, and desktop search tools. The key, finally, was to turn nearly everything in my life into emails. All my calendar entries, essay drafts, tweets—I wrote programs that turned them into gigs and gigs of emails. Emails are horrible, messy, swollen, decrepit forms of data, but they are understood by everything everywhere.

They suck, but they work. No higher praise.

The more “professional” a piece of software is intended to be, the more likely it is to be scriptable. CAD tools or 3D programs will provide whole languages just for configuration. But the huge consumer products, the operating systems themselves, are more and more locked down.

Then, one cold day—January 31, 2022—something bizarre happened. I was at home, writing a little glue function to make my emails searchable from anywhere inside my text editor. I evaluated that tiny program and ran it. It worked. Somewhere in my brain, I felt a distinct click. I was done.

I wonder if this is one of the reasons people get into crypto—they dream of a new world that can be customized like software

A lot of my friends hate all this stuff (perhaps NFTs more than DAOs) with great passion; they see it as a closing off, a betrayal of the open, trust-driven nature of the early web. Others love it, seeing it as a continuation of the community-building, empowering nature of the early web. What I see is a generation of configurers coming into their own

the likely outcome of the boom is that some people will cash out at the right time and become convinced that they hold the keys to the universe and will lecture us for the rest of our lives, and most people (like those who had their NFTs stolen) will be humbled, or at best break even. When in history have we been able to schedule folly? Sometimes the only way to end the vacation is to drive the RV off a cliff.

When I read these old messages, I am always surprised at how little I've changed, how consistent my obsessions are

You'd think there'd be at least five new me's by now, given how often I've vowed to become better. But no. I've been writing about configuring my text editor since 1996. I've been running my mouth about databases at least that long.

Since the emails are, well, just emails, sometimes I hit Reply (by typing “r”). On a thread that went dormant a decade ago.

often enough, people respond at length.

While the youth reconfigure society, I'm done configuring. A month has gone by since the click, and the urge to tweak is gone. My system looks like something from the '80s (a lot of it is from the '80s), but I finally got my room just the way I like it.

If you'd asked me, back when I was still configuring, not yet configured, exactly why I was nurturing these dozens of dotfiles, I'd have had a hard time telling you. I would have said: I want a pure and sleek experience. I want the computer working for me, augmenting my dumb brain with its immense arithmetical speed. I want access to my whole digital self. So I am very surprised that the terminal result of my efforts is not some sort of ecstatic communion with the internet, or even with my own computer. The function of my whole big orchestrated, tagged, integrated system was merely to rekindle old ties. What was all that configuration for? It was, in all sincerity, for waffles.