I think anyone that says there is “one true way” to be productive is probably selling something (or they’re suffering from some kind of sunk cost fallacy).

If you have something that works for you then that’s great, personally I see the appeal of intellij IDEs (I’m a very light user of PyCharm)- but most of the time I end up in the terminal.

My personal belief is that terminal programs have a much higher learning curve in the beginning but can be much more powerful in the mid to long term, and the constraints of not using graphical elements or being able to place anything anywhere actually leads to a more cut down and consistent experience.

I’d be using Mutt if it weren’t for the extreme prolificaction of html in emails.

But yes, YMMV and I dont think we have to be zealots about how we work unless you put constraints on other people for working much different. (For instance if I tried to force everyone to send text-only emails)

I still use Mutt, combined with offlineimap (due to exchange mail server), w3m for for converting mails from HTML, using markdown to write email, and pandoc to format back to HTML... Works like a charm!

Did not find any other mail client (although tried mailspring etc) with such powerfull customizations, nothing even close to Mutt.

Zsh too much bloat and configuration? Uh what?

Sounds like you're using oh my zsh which is seriously bloated.

Zsh and my 20 line .zshrc is basically equivalent to fish. (Only takes 5 or so to get it there)

That said, I have started toying with fish on one server simply because I'm annoyed by the 20 lines.

Similarly slowly moving to vscose but I find the configuration overhead a bit high. Why do I have to specify the same excludes for every plugin?

The main blocker for vscose is that it's just slow. Sublime text feels snappy, even plugin less vscode is sluggish.

For me, knowing the vi-style editing has been a boon, mostly because I often find myself in shells that are not mine.

8 times out of 10, there is at least vi there.

Sometimes I feel like it's not vi being so great, but alternatives being not so great. The only other editor you can expect on every shell machine is nano, but sometimes it's such a pain to use. Ctrl-Space to skip a word forwards - ok. Escape-Space to go backwards? Good luck doing that often on TouchBar Macbooks...

I use zsh with the grml config, it's not too slow and functional enough. https://grml.org/zsh/

Yeah I tried my hand at vim with all its crazy plugins and config to fit in with the other vim gods at work but found myself much more productive with vscode and easyvim