I have a confession to make.

Not too long ago I was doing all my development in Windows.

I know, I know. Terrible idea. And not just because it’s unfashionable. It actually requires so much extra set up and so many workarounds to accomplish anything even approaching a workflow.

Oddly enough, when I first started developing as more than just a passing hobby I did it all from within Linux. Of course, it was also within a graphical environment mostly. I found myself in a terminal about 30% of the time. I developed a healthy appreciation for the command line pretty early, but was still more comfortable doing my tippity-typing in a GUI.

Over time I consolidated hardware and picked up a couple of video games that I enjoyed playing and before I knew it I only had one PC and it was running Windows. It’s just easy. I honestly have nothing against it as an Operating System. I’m not one of those people who pretend it’s the devil or that people who use it are dumb or something. I really don’t care. But it just doesn’t work for me.

So in order for me to have a passable workspace I have to install something akin to VirtualBox, then PuTTy, and then download something like Ubuntu to install on a Virtual machine. Maybe set up Samba to make the files accesssible from within Sublime Text. Skipping some steps including downloading all my packages and etc because it’s kind of inevitable. (Also ignoring things like Vagrant because I’m not well-versed in it.)

That’s a lot of effort.

So I went back to my roots. Granted it’s not a lot better, but I set up a VPS through RamNode and improved my vim-fu. Also began using tmux which is incredible.

Suddenly I feel in control. Suddenly I want to work on things. I’m not destroying my concentration by having to move to my mouse all the time. I feel like I am commanding my environment rather than simply interacting with it. It feels great.

I’m not saying it necessarily will work for everyone, but I know for sure it pays to be comfortable in the command line. It also means I can do actual meaningful work on my Chromebook