After further inspection, Atuin looks sweet! Looks like they encrypt your history and offer finer-grained search (like dates and things). Great rec, thanks for sharing!
Interesting, syncing history across machines is pretty cool. While writing this I went looking for my yabai logs helper as an example, but of course, it's on my other machine, haha
Security (sharing secrets from that history) comes to mind, so I feel compelled to mention that adding a space before a command is a pattern for preventing it from being stored in history, though I think I had to opt-in to that in my zsh config: setopt HIST_IGNORE_SPACE
Feedback loops are super important! For momentum, for reducing burnout, for
implementing/debugging, everything. I think of it mostly as a tooling problem -
the point of maintaining and improving your tools is to maintain/improve your
feedback loops.
For me it's about this question: How quickly and easily can you verify that the
code is doing what you think it's doing?
This is what I love about writing Clojure - you can write and evaluate abritrary
bits of code (functions, expressions) without leaving the editor. Invoke a
keybinding to send the current expression to the running repl, and the resulting
value is returned, and can be interactively explored/walked in the editor. It
makes for a fun interactive dev-loop, and is a nice way to design a solution to
some problem. (A caveat is that getting into a working repl is non-trivial, as
it's dependent on your editor+plugins. It takes a bit of learning and
unfortunately isn't beginner-friendly.)
Vim and emacs are also excellent for improving you feedback loops - both take
some investment and some discomfort in the beginning, but ultimately you get out
what you put in, and soon you can imagine and realize better workflows without
much effort (adding your own functions, keybindings, hydras, etc). VSCode
and other editors are also hackable, to some extent.
Mostly I think it's important to hack on your tooling on a regular basis, at
least once a week or so.
My old boss used to say he expected us to keep 'sharp knives' (as in cooking). I
think companies should make time for the devs to work on tooling to improve
these feedback loops - it's the hiccups in the workflow that build up and lead
to burnout/fatigue. Smooth workflows can actually be energizing instead of
energy-draining!
Tauri is great. I haven't built a proper app with the nice native backend features, but i wrote a wrapper for passing a url on the command line, which lets you run an arbitrary web app like it's a native one: https://github.com/russmatney/clove
every time i'm playing some old guilty pleasure that isn't 'actually good' (think: just wanted to play a jock jam for a moment), i worry about the influence on next week's discover weekly....
After further inspection, Atuin looks sweet! Looks like they encrypt your history and offer finer-grained search (like dates and things). Great rec, thanks for sharing!