Reading hurts

Reading hurts because people (me included) don’t know how to write. We don’t cross out the wrong words. (sidenote: Mark Twain reference, at least according to Civilization 6.) If you don’t know how to keep attention of your readers, do everyone a favor, yourself included, and be concise. Go straight to the point and write 3-4 sentences instead of 3-4 paragraphs, because this is the most that people bear before losing interest. (sidenote: Too bad that schools teach the exact opposite of this idea.)

Paperless-ngx

Yesterday I installed paperless-ngx for management of my family documents. It is very good. It took me some time to re-categorize everything, because I had hoped that its neural network would do most of the grunt work, but it didn’t. After some learning it tagged some of the documents (incorrectly) and didn’t touch most of them, so I had to resort to the ordinary word- and regex-based rules. I actually had fun writing these and they now do 90% of work for new documents.

I don’t have a scanner which can output to the network share, but I added the consume directory (sidenote: Paperless-ngx automatically fetches all new documents from it.) to Syncthing and it’s great!

Fish Completion

It’s refreshing to use completion system in fish. Instead of gazillion scattered completion functions (like in Bash or ZSH), obscure manuals and unsearchable documents that only lead you to reverse engineering some online examples, fish has one command: complete. Just call it repeatedly for all possible arguments and you’re done. complete -h gives all the necessary details and online tutorial has many useful examples on top of it.

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.