Volume 3 left me typing at the speed of a concerned grandparent. Though I probably should leave it at that, I added even more changes :D The following upgrades are not too demanding on muscle memory, though, rather they remove some clutter that has been building up.
TL;DR: I replaced my shell. And my terminal. And my font. (Fonts, actually, plural. We’ll get to that. 😅)
zsh -> fish (again) Link to heading
Like Protonmail in Volume 1, this one’s a homecoming. My dotfiles still had a .config/fish folder full of dusty functions from last time.
The best argument for leaving zsh was something I found in my own Brewfile:
# Fish-like fast/unobtrusive autosuggestions for zsh
brew "zsh-autosuggestions"
# Fish shell like syntax highlighting for zsh
brew "zsh-syntax-highlighting"
I rest my case. I was installing plugins to make zsh do an impression of fish. What could be better than “fish-like”? Fish! And it’s fast, too:
(The autosuggestions are at least equally good out of the box; great news for someone who’s still hunting for his own backspace key.)
My whole config.fish is 19 lines, mostly boring. The only bit that took any thought was !!, which fish doesn’t do out of the box:
# make !! work
function last_history_item
echo $history[1]
end
abbr -a !! --position anywhere --function last_history_item
A hack? Sure. But --position anywhere means sudo !! works too, and that’s the only reason anyone ever needed !! anyway. Right?
For the prompt I explored both the defaults and Starship, but landed somewhere in between with hydro. My entire prompt setup is one line in fish_plugins:
jorgebucaran/hydro
Hydro is a tiny prompt by the same guy who made Fisher, and it’s async out of the box, so the prompt never sits around waiting for git. All I configured was putting the prompt on its own line, and letting it git fetch in the background too, so ahead/behind is actually up to date:
set -gx hydro_multiline true
set -gx hydro_fetch true
Pretty neat for two lines of config.
kitty -> ghostty Link to heading
Ghostty wants you to start with no config at all, and when you do change something it’s plain key = value. My config is mostly font related (we’ll get to that), and these essentials:
theme = Selenized Light
mouse-hide-while-typing = true
That’s all I have to say about Ghostty, other than it’s super great and feels more native on Mac than Kitty. On to the other twenty something lines.
IBM Plex -> Monaspace (four of them) Link to heading
I’ve been on Plex Mono (or rather, Blex, the nerd font version) for a good while, and it did nothing wrong. But then I found Monaspace from GitHub Next: five typefaces on the exact same grid, so you can mix them on one line without anything shifting.
Is it necessary? Not really, perhaps. Is it moral?! Debatable. Lo and behold:
font-family = "Monaspace Neon"
font-family-bold = "Monaspace Xenon"
font-family-italic = "Monaspace Radon"
font-family-bold-italic = "Monaspace Krypton"
Bold is a slab serif, italics look handwritten, and bold italics are for the rare moment my terminal needs to sound like a robot. Argon is also cool, but didn’t make it this time.
The rest is font-feature lines turning on texture healing and every ligature set there is. Yes, all of them. I’ve spent hours learning to type |> with one key on the new keyboard, of course I want it to look nice.
Oh, and Solarized -> Selenized Link to heading
Selenized is basically Solarized with the rough edges fixed. Same cozy vibe, easier on the eyes. Light variant, in both Ghostty and Neovim.
The Neovim side was the best diff of the whole thing: 21 lines out, 1 in. Turns out I had two different solarized.nvim plugins installed, both trying to be the colorscheme. No idea which one was winning, or for how long.
{ "calind/selenized.nvim" },
My favorite kind of diff.
Exit strategy Link to heading
cask "kitty" is still in my Brewfile. So is font-blex-mono-nerd-font. So is zsh, fish impressions and all.
Just in case. I’ve gone back from Protonmail once before, after all.
PS: Typing this post was faster than the previous one. I’m getting there!