I hate having to come up with titles for things. I’m bad at it. With blog posts it’s even worse, since the thing I am thinking about when I start writing is often not even the thing that the post turns out to be about, and I suck at titles anyway, and then looking back, it’s all nonsensical. Case in point: I want to write about a “code editor” that I’ve now looked at a couple of times (Nova, by Panic) but the way I got to this point now was by looking through my email inbox (which currently has 110 “unread”) emails and so I thought maybe I should write about email and why I’m not unsubscribing from the marketing list that got me to take a look at the editor. So the initial title I filled in at the top was, “Inbox Zero Is Bunk,” but then as I started typing I thought about looking through all my old posts and their titles (wondering if I’ve already written about this editor) and how my clever titles mean I have no fucking clue what most of these things are about.
It turns out that the company that makes Nova also made a video game that I liked (Firewatch) and they just sent me a marketing email about a new game they released (and about which I do not care). But I didn’t recognize the company name, so I went to their website and looked at their products and, oh, yeah, I’ve looked at this code editor before and considered it, but ultimately didn’t pull the trigger. Still, I thought it was worth hanging onto the info, since one never knows.
I think $100 is a reasonable amount to pay once for a good tool.
If I were doing stuff that I could do in just fancy text, I might even consider buying this thing.
For the moment, VS Code is what I use for editing Swift in a Docker container, but I could easily switch to Nova for that, especially since I’ve never managed to get the in-container debugger to work to my satisfaction and I just print messages to STDERR and STDOUT when I’m trying to work out issues on a server. A native editor would have to be really poorly written to be more of a resource pig than VS Code.
Oh, and there’s a lot of grumbling I could do about bulk commercial email, but it’s really beside the point. But “Inbox Zero” is bunk — it amounts to letting other people, who explicitly do not have your interest at heart, direct how you spend your precious mental resources. It costs effort to decide whether or not to read an email, let alone what action to take about it. Setting yourself some arbitrary goal like, “I’m going to empty my inbox. Every email that comes in, I’m going to deal with it,” is just volunteering to become a monkey on a leash for any and every marketer with a MailChimp account.