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Winter 2026
When I wrote about The Everyday Laptop I snuck in a little statement there about my text editor of choice. I am absolutely certain that all my brain heard was “challenge accepted”.
I live on a rural farm, have a three year old kid, a horse, a full time job, own a restaurant and hold the position of chairman in another company. Let’s just say time isn’t a plentiful resource. So why not spend a decent chunk of it learning a text editor that forces you to learn new key combinations to even move your cursor?
To get enough practice in a tight schedule, make the decision to abandon all productivity tools provided by your employer and substitute them with the aforementioned text editor. Make sure you also complicate things by implementing an esoteric and complicated method for note taking made famous by a German sociologist in the fifties. Something that your text editor of course cannot handle out of the box (but other software do).
First spend endless hours researching new plugins, start writing your own commands, tweak everything you can think of and then go for a bit more than that. Of course you will also spend many hours getting your various terminals (including your Windows 11 work laptop) to look just right. No effort can be spared when it comes to implementing color schemes and layout across your editor, multiplexer and terminal.
Then - very important - decide that you actually need to go for a more minimalistic approach that relies as much as possible on only native features. Realise that you have to re-write your entire config. Also decide that you need to build a config that works on all your machines - including your MorphOS laptop that only runs a quite outdated version of your editor.
Congratulations, you have now become the ultimate annoyance to your surroundings. Keep it up!