You're not really missing anything — for most of us the graph view is a cool demo you open twice and never again. Honest answer: plain .md in a git repo is the correct move if you're comfortable in vim. The only things you give up are a quick fuzzy-search UI and zero-friction access from a machine that doesn't have your dotfiles — and that gap is basically the entire reason lightweight note apps exist. I ended up building a tiny one (9Notes) for exactly that middle ground: markdown + instant search + autosave, but it's just a browser tab — no vault, no $4/month, no sync service to trust. If git+vim already works for you though, genuinely, keep the four bucks.

The "index literally everything by default" thing is peak feature-creep — you wanted a place to write markdown and got a search engine that treats your 100GB repo folder as a personal knowledge graph. Half the note apps now confuse "powerful" with "won't shut up". It's basically why I bailed and built a stupidly small one (9Notes): markdown, instant search over the notes and nothing else, opens in a browser tab, no indexing daemon quietly eating your RAM. Not a knock on Obsidian's ceiling — most of us just wanted a notepad, not a second IDE.

What actually made it stick for me, after bouncing off the "pure" 25/5 version a dozen times:

1) Match the session length to the task, not the dogma — deep work gets 50, boring admin gets 15. The rigid 25 is the fastest way to quit.

2) The break has to physically move you off the keyboard, otherwise it's just an alt-tab to Twitter.

3) Kill notifications for the whole session; the timer only helps if nothing else can interrupt you first.

The app barely matters — I use a dead-simple one I built (potatotimer) purely so I can set custom session/break lengths without fighting a bloated "productivity suite". The discipline is the notifications part, honestly.

Honestly the anime-intro method is more disciplined than most "productivity systems" — you've basically reinvented pomodoro with better theme music. The whole trick is just having any external cue to start and stop; there's nothing magic about the number 25. When you eventually run out of intros, a dumb little countdown does the same job (built one, potatotimer, for exactly the boring version of this). Whatever gets you off the "one more episode" loop.

Heavily, and it crept up over the years — the less I leave the terminal, the less context I lose flipping between windows. I even dragged editing into it: built a small terminal editor in Rust (Oxru) that keeps a project's terminals as tabs, so I basically never alt-tab out now. The CLI is a black hole; things fall in and don't come back.

The unsolicited 'set up your PHP environment' nag is peak modern-IDE energy — it decided your intent and now you must argue with it. Half of why I ended up writing a bare terminal editor in Rust (Oxru) was wanting something that just opens the file and shuts up, no extension convinced it knows better than me.

Solid roundup. If you ever want the opposite end of the Electron-editor spectrum, terminal editors are worth a look — I built one in Rust (Oxru) that's basically 'VSCode's file tree + integrated terminals, minus the 300MB.' Not a fair fight on features, but the startup time lives in a different universe.

For read-only code browsing, a terminal editor with a fuzzy file picker + tree-sitter highlighting gets you most of the way without a full IDE spinning up. I've been using one I built called Oxru for exactly this — open it, jump around the tree, read, close. No project indexing, no language servers waking up. github.com/p32929/oxru.

That editor migration path is painfully familiar — you keep chasing 'the one' and just end up with five installed. I eventually gave up and built a minimal terminal editor in Rust (Oxru) for the lightweight end of the spectrum. Doesn't pretend to replace a full IDE, but it's fast and stays out of the way, which is most of what I wanted anyway.

Sublime for pure speed, but I've been scratching my own itch with a terminal-based one in Rust (Oxru) — fuzzy file picker, tree-sitter highlighting, and it corrals a project's terminals into tabs so I stop losing them behind other windows. Very WIP, but it's quietly taken over my 'quick edit over SSH' workflow.

Neovim for real work — but lately I've been daily-driving a little thing I built called Oxru, a terminal editor in Rust that keeps all of a project's terminals as tabs inside the editor. Mostly born out of being sick of alt-tabbing between six terminal windows. github.com/p32929/oxru if you're curious, though fair warning it's macOS-only for now.

Same boat — VSCode is simultaneously the best thing about Electron and the strongest argument against it. Got tired enough of the RAM tax that I built a tiny terminal editor in Rust (Oxru). Not remotely VSCode's ecosystem, but for quick edits over SSH it opens instantly and weighs basically nothing.

The 'every app is secretly a browser now' thing genuinely radicalized me. I went the other way and wrote my editor in Rust so it runs in the terminal instead of shipping a whole Chromium — it starts instantly and doesn't eat 400MB just to show a file tree. Called it Oxru. Obviously nowhere near VSCode on features, but my RAM stopped filing complaints.

This is exactly the gap that got to me too — GUI editors are dead weight the second you're in an SSH session. Ended up building a small one in Rust called Oxru that lives entirely in the terminal (fuzzy file picker + tree-sitter highlighting), and it keeps every terminal a project needs as tabs inside itself so you're not babysitting tmux panes. github.com/p32929/oxru — still macOS-only, but it scratches this exact itch.

Habitica worked for me right up until the streak became the point — at which stage you've gamified anxiety, not habits. Ended up building a dumber tracker that just logs sleep/mood/habits and surfaces the correlations instead of handing out XP: github.com/p32929/let

The "please keep it secret" line sitting directly above five recipients is genuinely poetic. This is the exact case for a one-time link — s3cr3tm3 gives you a URL that self-destructs after the first read, so the inevitable reply-all only forwards a dead link: https://s3cr3tm3.netlify.app

Requiring a build step just to use a script tag is a choice, and usually the wrong one. Until maintainers come around, ghcdn covers it: paste any GitHub file or gist URL, get a CDN URL back, drop it straight into a script tag. https://github.com/p32929/ghcdn

One year of experience repeated N times

The "do something that doesn't use the same part of your brain" bit is the part people skip — they take a break by switching to a different screen. The timer advice holds though

Math is hard right up until it's the third time you've seen the same pattern, then it's muscle memory. I built mathfinity for exactly that — a browser mental-math drill you play in 2-minute bursts, nothing to install: https://p32929.github.io/mathfinity

Shipping a whole browser per app was always the trade: 400mb on disk, a Chromium tab's worth of RAM at runtime. Nothing fixes that except not using Electron — the most you can do is not stack 300 deps on top. That's roughly why electron-shadcn-typescript exists: Electron + React + TS + Tailwind + shadcn, nothing else.

Markdown + git for notes holds up surprisingly well — version history on your own brain is underrated, and no company can sunset it. I did exactly this and eventually built a small editor around it called notes, if you want the repo-as-notebook idea with an actual UI on top: https://github.com/p32929/notes

The best part is he clearly knew template literals existed and then hedged his bets anyway. Somewhere in that file is a `+ ", " +` that's load-bearing. I got tired enough of gluing strings by hand that I wrote str_template — a tiny TS lib that just fills named placeholders. Same energy, fewer plus signs.

The 20+ Chrome tabs are doing more damage than Docker at this point, but nobody wants to hear that. I ended up writing oxru, a Rust terminal code editor that keeps every project terminal as a tab inside one app — mostly so I'd stop having six terminal windows eating RAM for no reason. https://github.com/p32929/oxru

This is the kind of story they should read to junior devs at bedtime. A true automation legend - the sort of person who scripts himself out of three jobs and calls it Tuesday.

My contribution to the genre is far humbler: a tiny CLI called cmdn that just saves the templated commands I keep retyping. Not the mother of all automations. More like a distant cousin who means well.

The Google pizza bit is funny until you realize its just a documentary. They know your address, your order history, your cholesterol, and probably your regrets. Privacy is basically a nostalgia genre now.

Small act of rebellion I ship: s3cr3tm3, where you send a secret via a one-time self-destructing link so at least that one thing doesnt live in some log forever. Cant fix the pizza, can nuke the message.

Ah yes, the classic "YOUR code broke prod, join this bridge with 40 people immediately" - which somehow always turns out to be a config nobody owns. Love being volunteered for a war I didnt start.

The only thing that saves me from those calls is seeing it break first. I run a small monitoring dashboard called let for uptime/latency/errors, so ideally I notice the fire before the angry bridgeline invite lands. Ideally.

Twenty years distilled into a post and it still lands better than most onboarding docs. Genuinely appreciate people who write this stuff down instead of gatekeeping it.

The one habit that actually stuck for me from all the advice I ignored: keep plain notes. Nothing fancy - I literally use a little app called notes - but writing the thing down beats trusting my brain to remember it in six months.

The real lesson of devRant is that there is no safe technology choice, only different flavors of people mad at you. Java, php, tabs, vim, your OS - pick any, someone is already drafting the rant.

So naturally I built oxru, a browser-based VS-Code-ish editor with a file tree and terminals. Consider it my formal contribution to the list of things people can now have strong opinions about. Youre welcome.

Refusing an entire OS because of your feelings about one person is an impressive amount of energy to spend on being wrong. Imagine boycotting kernels over vibes.

Funny thing is it doesnt matter which side he picks - apps freeze on all of them equally. Thats actually why I made boom, a little menubar button that instantly force-kills whatever locked up. Cross-ideology suffering, one-click cure.