Building MY tech environment

I’m a long time Arch Linux user for a reason: out of the box, it doesn’t feel particularly interested in telling me how I should use my computer.
It starts with a minimal base and expects you to assemble the environment you actually want. Its own philosophy emphasizes simplicity, minimalism, and configuring the system yourself rather than relying on a preassembled desktop experience.

I like tools that gives me a small, almost bare-bones starting point and then gets out of my way. Software where the first few hours might involve reading documentation, changing keybindings, writing configuration files, and occasionally wondering “why on earth did I choose to do this to myself?” And then, eventually, it becomes mine.

When I think about customization, I keep making things look pretty for when I get bored. The most important point for me is to remove friction between what I want to do and actually doing it.

Today, I want to share examples of how I’ve buily my Arch environment essentially as a collection of these highly customizable tools, each shaped around the way I think and work. But also how this philosophy extend beyond my computer usage.

Making a Computer Feel Like Yours

Modern software often tries very hard to be helpful. It gives you a sidebar. It decides where things should go. It adds buttons for the features it thinks you’ll use. It changes the interface every few years. It gives you a dozen ways to accomplish something that could have been a keyboard shortcut.

There are obvious advantages to this approach. It makes software approachable, and sometimes that’s exactly what you want. But I’ve found that once I spend enough time with a tool, I don’t necessarily want it to be build the way developpers assume it’s the best way to use it. I want it to be predictable. I want to decide what a key does. I want to decide what information is displayed. I want to decide how things are organized. And, perhaps most importantly, I want the tool to stay out of my way once I’ve figured it out.

That’s why I’ve chosen programs like Neovim, Neomutt, and Taskwarrior amongst tons of others.

Neovim: My Computer’s Workshop

Neovim is probably the clearest example of this philosophy.

At first glance, a terminal-based editor with modal editing can seem almost absurdly inconvenient. Why not use something with a toolbar? Why remember obscure commands? Why configure your editor with Lua when there are perfectly good graphical editors available?
Because after enough customization, Neovim stops feeling like an application and starts feeling like an extension of the way I work.

I can shape the editor around the things I actually do. My keybindings become muscle memory. Plugins provide exactly the pieces of functionality I need. The interface is arranged around the information I care about rather than around somebody else’s idea of a general-purpose editor. And there is something particularly satisfying about opening a configuration file and thinking: “I wish this worked differently”. Then changing it.

That feedback loop is important. The software isn’t a fixed object that I have to adapt myself to. The software and I gradually adapt to each other. I don’t have to remember how the developer intended me to work.

I can build a workflow that makes sense to me.

Over time, that can have a surprisingly large effect on productivity. Small amounts of friction disappear:

• Opening a project becomes automatic.
• Navigating files becomes muscle memory.
• Frequently used commands get their own shortcuts.
• The editor presents the information I need without the information I don’t.
• Repetitive tasks get turned into commands or mappings.

None of these individually sounds revolutionary. Together, they make the computer feel faster. Not necessarily because the computer is technically faster, but because I’m spending less time negotiating with it.

Neomutt: Email Without the Email App

Email is another place where I prefer to have the computer stay out of the way.

NeoMutt takes the traditional Mutt approach and extends it with additional features. Arch Linux describes Mutt as a powerful text-based mail client, while NeoMutt is available as the feature-enhanced version.

Again, the appeal isn’t that using email from a terminal is inherently better. It’s that I can decide what email should mean to me. I can customize keybindings, colors, sorting, mail views, message composition, external commands, and the relationship between my email client and the rest of my environment.

The result is much less like “using an email application” and more like having an email interface that happens to live inside my workflow. This is particularly powerful when combined with the rest of my environment.

Neomutt can hand composition off to my editor. My editor already knows my keybindings, formatting preferences, and shortcuts. Other command-line tools can handle searching, filtering, sending, or manipulating mail. Instead of one giant application trying to do everything, I get a collection of small pieces that cooperate. That is one of the recurring themes in my setup:

I don’t need every tool to do everything. I need each tool to do its job really well and give me enough control to connect it to everything else.

Taskwarrior: A Todo List I Can Actually Think In

Taskwarrior takes the same idea and applies it to something deceptively difficult: keeping track of things I need to do.

Taskwarrior is fundamentally a command-line task manager, but its configuration system lets you define reports, filters, contexts, colors, attributes, and much more. Its configuration file is deliberately minimal: sensible defaults do most of the work, and you override only what you want to change.
Rather than opening a blank productivity application and being presented with somebody else’s organizational philosophy, I can build my own.

I can decide what constitutes a project, how I want tasks displayed, contexts for different parts of my life, I can add metadata that makes sense to me, I can create reports that answer the questions I actually have. And because it’s command-line based, adding a task can be incredibly lightweight.

There isn’t a dashboard to navigate, a modal dialog, a decision about which button I’m supposed to press. There’s just the task.
Then, because Taskwarrior supports custom attributes and configurable reports, the system can grow alongside the way I use it.

That distinction matters. A productivity system shouldn’t require me to reorganize my brain around its interface. It should help me organize my brain.

The Same Philosophy Outside the Computer

What’s interesting is that the same pattern can be applied to hardware as well.
Two examples that fit surprisingly well are the Xteink X4 and my Corne split keyboard .

The Xteink X4

The Xteink X4 is a tiny e-ink reader designed around simplicity and portability. That combination is appealing to me for the same reason I like minimal Linux software. The device doesn’t need to become a miniature tablet. It doesn’t need to do everything. It is deliberately constrained. And those constraints are useful.

An e-ink screen encourages me to read rather than endlessly interact with an interface. Physical buttons give me something tactile and predictable. The small size means the device can disappear into a pocket rather than becoming another glowing rectangle competing for my attention.

Thanks to our amazing community, I can very simply - and within 10 seconds - install whichever firmware best fits my needs and tweak the X4 to be mine.

There’s a kind of freedom in something that does less, but lets you achieve more.

The Corne

This is perhaps the most literal expression of the whole idea. With a conventional keyboard, I adapt my hands to the keyboard. With a programmable split keyboard, I can start asking the opposite question: What if the keyboard adapted to me?

The physical layout is only part of it. The really interesting part is the layers and key mappings. I can decide where symbols live. I can put frequently used commands under my thumbs. I can create layers for navigation. I can make a key behave differently depending on whether I tap or hold it. And because the keyboard becomes part of the same muscle-memory system as Neovim, the customization compounds. A carefully chosen keyboard layout makes Neovim more comfortable. Neovim makes terminal workflows more efficient.
Those terminal workflows make tools like Taskwarrior and Neomutt more useful. And suddenly the entire environment starts behaving like one coherent system.

That’s the part I find fascinating. Minimalism and customization let you build an environment that fits your needs without pretending it does; instead of locking yourself into a closed ecosystem and mistaking a seamless workflow for freedom, you shape the tools around yourself. The smoothness comes from choice, not from learning to live within someone else’s constraints.

Customization Is a Form of Automation

There’s a temptation to think of customization as procrastination. And, honestly, sometimes it is. There is always another plugin to try, another configuration file to reorganize, another keyboard layout that might theoretically be 3% better. But there’s a useful distinction between customization as entertainment and customization as automation.

If I spend twenty minutes creating a shortcut that saves me ten seconds every day, that’s not necessarily wasted time. If I configure my editor so that something I do fifty times a day takes one keystroke instead of five, that’s not decoration. If I build a Taskwarrior report that immediately shows me the tasks relevant to what I’m doing right now, I’m not making my todo list prettier. I’m reducing cognitive overhead.

The best customization is almost invisible.

Eventually, I stop thinking about the configuration entirely. My fingers just know what to do.

The Cost of Making Something Yours

This philosophy of eliminating pollution from our workflow should resonate with many today, particularly at a time when greater emphasis is being placed on topics like reducing environmental pollution, improving creativity, decreasing cognitive load.

There is, of course, a downside. Highly customizable software has a learning curve. Neovim doesn’t hand you a perfect configuration. Neomutt doesn’t necessarily behave like your built-in email client. Taskwarrior isn’t going to magically organize your life. A programmable keyboard requires you to actually design a layout. And Arch Linux will happily let you spend an entire evening wondering why something isn’t working because you forgot to configure it. But I think that’s an important trade-off.

When software is highly opinionated, the initial experience is often easier. When software gives you enormous freedom, the initial experience can be harder. The reward comes later.

You develop knowledge.
You build muscle memory.
You create conventions.
You create shortcuts.
And eventually the system becomes something you understand deeply.

That’s a very different relationship with technology.

MY Computer

This is ultimately why I like in this philosophy. The appeal isn’t minimalism for minimalism’s sake. It’s not about bragging that I can do something in a terminal. It’s not even really about avoiding graphical applications. It’s about ownership of the workflow.

Arch gives me a minimal foundation.
Neovim gives me an editor I can shape.
Neomutt gives me email that fits into my existing workflow.
Taskwarrior gives me a task system I can organize around the way I think.
The X4 gives me a deliberately focused reading device.
The Corne lets me physically customize the interface between my hands and the computer.

Each one starts with a set of capabilities rather than a rigid prescription for how those capabilities should be used. And over time, those little decisions accumulate.
My shortcuts become habits. My configuration becomes muscle memory. My tools start working together.

The computer stops feeling like a collection of applications and starts feeling like my environment.
That’s the real productivity benefit of customization for me. It’s not that customized software magically makes me more productive. It’s that every small piece of friction I remove gives me a little more attention back. And when enough of those little pieces disappear, I can stop thinking about the tools altogether.