Fish

On one laptop I encountered a strange slowdown in zsh: loading any completion script from a custom fpath, even an empty file, adds ~500 ms to the startup time. I’ve heard many good things about fish, so I decided that this might be good opportunity to give it a proper testing. (sidenote: I had tried it few times in the past, but not for long.) After few days, and this is incredibly fast for me, I think that I’ll stick with it. Few minor annoyances for me are:

• I have some scripts which do something like ssh $SHELL -c ..., which fails if there’s no fish on remote system (there usually isn’t). I had to switch to SHELL=sh ssh $SHELL -c ...
• I can’t get used to replacing oldschool backticks (for invoking subshell) with parentheses
• ctrl-c doesn’t produce an empty prompt - this makes sense, but I have a muscle memory of doing it to produce a few empty lines of visual separation between commands.

I kinda love everything else (including startup speed), so it’s a win I guess.

Facebook

We agreed to our kids’ request to buy mice (2-3 females). Turns out, it’s super hard to find them in our area (at least when you care to not buy snake food). I found a single nearby breeder but to get in touch I had to… create a Facebook account. And this makes me a little sad, a little angry and a little disappointed. Screw this, we should have agreed for a dog.

Isles of the Emberdark

Huh, it seems I missed that few months ago Brandon published his 5th secret project, “Isles of the Emberdark”. Instant buy, but now I’m torn, because I’m deep in the first volume of his “Alcatraz” series and at the same time I want to read “Isles” so badly… Maybe I’ll read a chapter from Isles and then a chapter from Alcatraz?

Brain Coding

I just stumbled upon a term of “brain coding”. (sidenote: In contrast to “vibe coding” which means writing an application with help of AI/LLM.) Oh, the irony, I love it! And I’m stealing it.