Recent mutt progress

Wow, it has been a long time since I posted to my blog. The good news is I've been busy. Let's see, to start, I released mutt 1.5.24 back in September. For my first release, it went pretty smoothly, although Brendan ended up having the mail the announcement out.

After a few emails, David Champion and I decided the next release should be 1.6.0. At this point, I'm not sure how much excitement that will generate, 1.5 being de-facto stable, but nonetheless it's long overdue, and I am excited. So I've been working through the 1.6 tagged bugs, and starting to review external patches. The current plan is February or March.

I spent all of September and October in Taiwan. Usually I have plenty of time to work on the computer, but this trip we planned a lot of activities, including a trip to Japan.

Recently, I tried out spacemacs. My first impression was pretty good. I've always wanted to try to learn more emacs, but every time I've given up pretty quickly: after using vim for 20+ years, it's just hard to start over, and I'm pretty productive in vim. Unfortunately, even though I liked spacemacs, I found it really easy to lock up just by scrolling the cursor. Some things in evil mode worked differently enough from vim that I found myself annoyed sometimes, but the lockups were the deal breaker.

Still, since then I have tried once again to start learning more emacs (using my own .emacs config). I'm using it to write this blog post, and have been doing some small stuff in it. We'll see.

The past year, after reading Marie Kondo's "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing", I have worked on reducing the amount of things in my life. The book isn't about minimalism, it's about removing things that don't "spark joy", as Marie says. I found her ideas and stories in the book made a lot of sense to me. While my environment now isn't perfect, it is far better than it has ever been before and I feel happier working in my study at home. If you feel you have just too much stuff, I highly recommend keeping an open mind and reading this book.

Well, that's enough for now. I'll try to post again before the 1.6.0 release with an update.

posted: Dec 17 2015
tags: mutt life