TLDR;: This blog will be about removing friction from my workflow by making use of the Linux command line and staying away from the mouse for the most part. Most of the time in english, sometimes in german.

Although I'm a Linux user since 2002, I wasted most of the time using it as a glorified Windows. I didn't even know what I was doing for the first few years, so I worked around the perceived "shortcomings" while remaining completely ignorant of the benefits of running a Unix-like system. Over time I got used to using the command line for administration tasks and did most of my development in vim, but still used GUI applications for everything else.

Then last year something clicked. I had just started at a full time position as a python developer. In the weeks before, I had decided to try Windows 8.1 after over 10 years of exclusively using Linux and had found PyCharm for use with Python. Then when I started my new position, I knew that PyCharm worked on Linux as well and decided to stick with it (Ubuntu 14.04 at the time). It wasn't long before I got frustrated with my new working environment. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to diss PyCharm here. It's a feature-rich IDE and I recommend using it if IDEs are your cup of tea. It just wasn't for me. I kept wasting time browsing through menus when looking for a feature and trying out my code in an integrated shell when I had a perfectly fine shell in my terminal. So I switched back to vim.

This time it was the beginning of a journey to take full advantage of the power of Unix-like operating systems that I should have started back in the 90s when I first got in touch with SunOs at university.

I slowly revamped my working environment and by now have arrived at a combination of Archlinux, Awesome WM, rxvt-unicode, zsh and vim. And the journey is far from over. So I decided to share some of the things I learned (and will learn) on the way while reserving the right to write about something completely unrelated from time to time (and probably in german).