---
title: Writing about the tools I use
date: 2026-02-02T07:12:32.939Z
slug: 2026-02-02-writing-about-the-tools-i-use
author: Thomas Wilson

---
2026 might actually be the year of Linux on the desktop (and I'm not just saying that).

For semi-related reasons, I find myself reinstalling a great deal of the software I use daily onto a new linux-based workstation.  Tools like:

- [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md) for personal journalling, archiving newsletters, writing things like this very blog post.
- [Lazyvim](https://www.lazyvim.org) the neovim (an in-terminal text editor) distribution with opinions about packages and keybindings.
- [Zed](https://zed.dev) the small, very fast, text editor that reminds me of using Sublime Text back in the day.
- [Vivaldi](https://vivaldi.com) the Chromium-based browser (I'm still mourning Arc, and having to re-create it piecemeal with extensions and settings)
- [Ghostty](https://ghostty.org) the terminal emulator (fast, efficient, plain)
- [Warp](https://www.warp.dev) a terminal emulator (slower, resource hungry, extremely friendly but increasingly AI-first )

It's made me think a little deeper about the tools I use on a daily basis, and in particular why I need three[^2] text editors (four, if you count Obsidian - and why wouldn't you?  I used it to write this very blog post).

One might ask: why do you need three (or four) separate programmes to edit text, can't you just use `$APP` for everything?  And there _are_ people who use one editor for everything[^1] and power to them.

The tools of a craft have always been interesting me.  And look, [here's a blog post from 2020](/blog/2020-09-28-software-engineering-as-a-craft) where I defend the idea of software as craft.  Reading it back, I think I'm much more okay now (in the utopian year 2026), I think I am much more okay with the idea people thinking of themselves as technicians rather than craftspeople is actually totally okay.  You wanna turn up and follow the rhythms, maintain the systems, keep everything on track in prescribed, rigorous ways?  That's great, my friend, adventure forth. 

I've met enough tool, language, or framework agnostics to know it doesn't *really* matter, not really, how you configure your editor when you write your precious little code.  People are out here writing Actually Useful (tm) software on their phones, i absolutely guarantee it.

But I still think it's cool to have opinions about the minutia.  I think if there weren't people out there evangelising about vim or Rails or cheap VPSs in the year 2010, I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am now.  

All this to defend that I want to, at some point in the future, write a little blog post about how much I love neovim, or how I keep going back to Zed, and how I'm trying out a new terminal emulator.  Things that quite literally nobody cares about, dude.

It's a little bit like the aphorism *how you do anything is how you do everything* - where I think it's important to consider the "small" details of a process.  I think it's sometimes better to not do something at all than to do it poorly.  

But also, it's possible to spend a whole lifetime [yak shaving](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving) or finessing the small details without *actually* solving a problem.  To debate endlessly which is actually the better tool for a job.  The seemingly incurable procrastination of some people, even very successful professionals like Douglas Adams[^3], show that it's possible to yak shave and be successful at the same time.  I think, in practice, very few of us have the other traits that helped Adams produce work of his quality.

[^1]: And those people, largely, use emacs.  A tool my smooth, uncivilised brain has failed to engage with at the most basic level.

[^2]: VS Code isn't mentioned above, but I use it for various bits and bobs

[^3]: Famous author of *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*.  Stephen Fry was a close friend of Adams, and in Fry's autobiography provides a great first-hand account of how Adams would do quite literally anything to avoid the process of actually writing.