I have a Diplom¹ in Jazz Guitar. One of the reasons for making such a questionable decision was the fact that I needed an artistic outlet. I have always been fascinated by music, and ever since I remember I wanted to make music. Now I wasn’t any good at it till I started studying it seriously, but it was through Jazz that I was able to express myself freely in a (quite literally) formal² context.

This is something that I think defines me as a person. I don’t usually look for the easiest way, or the hardest way of doing things. I seek to do things in a way where I can express myself, in a way where I can be uniquely me. I find that satisfying: all humans are unique. There should not be one tool beyond the most basic simple tools that are perfect for ’everyone’. Whenever there is talk of such a thing, there is talk of compromise. Yes, I am not going to get artisanal screwdrivers that are perfect for the shape of my hands and are carved from the exotic woods of the branches of a binary tree, because that is expensive, cumbersome, and I don’t use screwdrivers 24/7 to justify such a purchase.

But do you know what I work with every day? Computers. You probably knew, but most people don’t know that customizing computers is a very easy task, if you have the right framework. I don’t need a riced setup where every window animates and phases in an out of existence. I run a bare and minimal i3 setup. It is highly functional, I am extremely fast and comfortable with it, I don’t need to think about what I am doing, and it is perfectly and completely personalized for me. I feel like I have mastered navigating my computer, just as learning Jazz guitar taught me how to master my instrument³.

I felt creative when I was setting up my environment. The idea was to see what my hands wanted to do when my brain wanted to do a task, for instance switching to the next workspace, and then just configure i3 to do that which my hands want to do by default. That’s really easy, it turns out I have strong preferences on how I want my shortcuts to work (especially considering my preference for the 34 key keyboards, but that’s a subject for a different time). Sometimes there is a little problem solving required, but nothing that a couple of nights of hacking won’t fix. That may sound like much, but it is a creative endeavor which (for me at least) is a lot of fun, because I get to tackle problems till I can achieve perfection. This is much easier to do with computers than is in music for instance. Maybe I need this program to open up on the right side of my chats workspace on launch, maybe I need my Weechat IRC session that tmuxes into my server to have a different terminal config. A little bit of creative work here and there, and in the end you have something that you can truly identify with and is uniquely yours.

Emacs enables me to take this approach and apply it to almost all of daily computing, but we are not talking only about customization. Emacs (and in my experience, evil-mode⁴) allow me to think about my text as music, with the instrument being not a guitar, but my trusty Ferris Sweep. Using Vim motions in this enormously powerful Elisp interpreter feels like magic. Now it’s not only about editing text, it’s about how I can do it being truly myself; how I can manipulate these letters that I see on the screen just in the same way I improvise in music.

Do I need to surround this integer in brackets, then add commas after every digit? Do I need to copy something from the inside of a quotation mark 20 lines up, and then paste it instead of every occurrence of the word occurrence? Or perhaps rename my files the same way I send my Emails? Of course those who use Emacs think that this is borderline too easy (except the last one), but I am not sure if is truly easy in the text editors that “normal”, “non-nerdy” people use⁵. The point is also not that these tasks are possible (or impossible) in other environments in the first place, the point is that there is a sense of creativity that flows into these tasks. For these two simple tasks (…and a weird one), I can think of at least three different solutions for each problem. The one I choose could depend on my mood, the day of the week, the weather in Alaska or the planetary alignment of Venus and Mars.

I get to choose, and I have a choice of doing it using method A or method B⁶. Ignoring the quantity of approaches where one can achieve a goal, some of these approaches require problem solving and the ability to think ahead. It’s just nice having your brain tickled when you are doing mundane tasks. I think it keeps me sharp. It’s not about doing things necessarily in the easiest way because of course using a mouse would be easier, but it’s also no fun at all, and doesn’t elicit any sense of joy in me.⁷