Joey Hess

> Now we (as a population) expect to give entertainment and give advice about our lifestyle, like we do with smartwatches or fitness devices.

I always think about Lindy effect [1] in this context: the life expectancy of a technology, idea or (in our case) a societal habit is proportional to its current age. It follows, then, that the idea of a multi-purpose computing device may also wear off in certain areas of life, or for certain types of people. Not always, not everywhere is there a need for complex or complicated devices or systems. There will always be people who seek or prefer a simpler, quieter life that involves as little technology as possible.

What's really interesting is that many of these people seem to have a remarkably deep understanding of technology, and great skills [2]. Possibly because of this knowledge, they're really clear (or, pedantic :) about what they don't need.

In the end, though, I've come to think that this may be more of a simple psychological preference (for less stimulation) than a rationalized choice. Who knows.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

2: Some of the people I really look up to: http://collapseos.org/, http://joeyh.name/, https://sassenrath.com/

One thing I've noticed about lists like these is that the tools are mostly flashy and feature-packed, almost invariably with colorized output, sometimes with funky Unicode symbols like check marks, and usually written in a fashionable language like Rust or Go.

Some of them, I've found, don't work too well on the Linux framebuffer console, which is where I spend most of my time. They seem to be designed with 256-color terminals in mind.

I get the appeal, but small and simple stuff written in C, with very few dependencies, is more to my taste. I'm wondering if there are many others who feel similarly.

Thinking of moreutils[1] as a classic example that solves problems not easily solved by the standard POSIX tools, but in a very straightforward and non-flashy way.

[1] https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

It might be worth noting that while ripgrep doesn't support in-place file editing, it's still possible to replace matches using the `-r` flag, couple that with a tool like `sponge` from moreutils[0] and you can effectively perform search and place like such:

$ rg --passthru search -r replace file.txt | sponge file.txt And preview changes like this:

$ rg --passthru search -r replace file.txt | diff -u file.txt - Of course, this is only practical when working with a single file. Though I'd imagine if one threw in the `--files-with-matches -0` flags together and piped that into `xargs`, something similar to `rep` could be be achieved. (Not that I'd encourage anyone to do this at all)

[0] https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

Very interesting, I’ll definitely give it a try!

Another approach I recently discovered is an old but beautiful Unix-style tool for renaming files: vidir - edit a directory in your text editor. It’s part of the moreutils suite [1].

You get the list of filenames in your editor – edit them as you like, save, exit, and it renames the files. It uses whatever editor is set in your $EDITOR env var, so it doesn’t have to be vi/vim.

You can also pipe in a list of files, e.g. `find . -type f | vidir -`, to edit just the files you want - and you can even change paths (add, rename, remove directories) in the editor to move files around easily.

To try it quickly on macOS: `brew install moreutils`

[1] https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

Congrats Joey, I love git-annex[1]!

Let's make it a two year position and throw in Tahoe-LAFS/git-annex integration;)

[1] and etckeeper, and mr, and moreutils...

Edit:

It occured to me that some people may not be familiar with the other projects I mentioned:

etckeeper: git/bzr/hg for /etc and apt firendly (http://joeyh.name/code/etckeeper/)

mr: easily manage a lot of repositories from multiple DRCSs git/bzr/hg/et al (http://joeyh.name/code/mr/)

moreutils: an expansion pack for coreutils. (http://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/)

Tahoe-LAFS: Cloud Storage for cypherpunks (https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs)

No one even attempts to quantify the the effects they claim are so important.

Perhaps I didn't phrase that strongly enough but growing the economy or making it more efficient is not the point. It's at most a rationalization.

go live in a rural area, consume very little, and survive with bad internet

That's not a realistic advice. It's extremely difficult, puts having a family largely out of reach, and places you away from potential collaborators. Even Joey Hess[1][2] has to resort to crowd funding and grants.

[1] https://joeyh.name/

[2] https://usesthis.com/interviews/joey.hess/