This will allow you to easily see which feeds are stale. I should probably add some sort of sort feature next. You can also see if a feed has never been fetched which means the url is probably bad.

The last change I made was I removed the link from the feed url so that it is just rendered as text. Clicking on the rss feed url isn’t usually very friendly as your browser will either open up the giant xml file, download it, or complain. I then added a url though to the feed name that takes you to all the posts for the specific feed.

It’s nice to keep polishing an app I’m working on and currently using. Hopefully I can keep making it a little bit each day.

Yes, I’m building an RSS reader. Not so that I can avoid looking at websites, but so that I can visit them more! Be sure to click through and visit the source. They really are modern art and way more fun to visit than just a social media feed.

• birchtree - Love the sidebar, has a link feed, and even gated member content.
• Jake Goldsborough - Jake is one of my new co-works at Discourse! Love the theme.
• Dave Rupert - Unique design and even has a Bookshelf to peruse.
• Mike Perham - Simple with a long history. I like how he’s using a personal blog still for such a successful project like Sidekiq.
• Lee Robinson - So clean. Even has some subtle stats.

Equal to the level of inspiration though, I also get incredibly frustrated because I’m working on code that can really only run in “production”. I often have no idea if something will work until I merge my PR and manually test it. It’s a terrible way to work.

Lex Fridman (04:19:33) Another thing we’ve talked about, which I think is a fascinating topic, is the power of the mind, power of thought. Do you believe you can affect your life and reality by thinking about it, by manifesting it into being? What do you think?

Pavel Durov (04:19:55) There are many explanations why it works. One thing most people agree on is that setting goals and staying positive and confident does allow you to achieve the things you want to achieve. It’s very hard to believe though that you can just manifest things into being without applying effort in the direction that seems to be logical. Maybe some people exist that can just sit on the bank of a river and materialize things by the power of their thought. But I’m not sure I’m one of these people. I always found it more easy to believe that if you couple this optimism and faith with logical action, then it is bound to be successful.

Lex Fridman (04:21:04) Prolonged effort, hard work, coupled with positive focus, thinking about the thing.

Pavel Durov (04:21:13) Oh yes, over many, many, many days. It’s possible to imagine our world as a high dimensional universe where humans have the ability to navigate through it with the power of belief, which is coupled with positive emotion and logical thinking. But we are getting into an esoteric realm. We don’t have any proof of that. But we also know that we probably at this point haven’t discovered even 1% about this universe.

Lex Fridman (04:22:00) I agree with you fully, and I like what you said in the way you were thinking about it. You’ve told me before that maybe there’s a way that with effort and with the focused mind, you can shape, you can morph the landscape of probabilities around you. It’s a nice way to visualize it, that somehow our effort and our focus changes the things that are likely and less likely. And by focusing on it, we make the thing more and more likely, at least as an estimate, as the kind of field that we, through our thoughts and through our actions, change that field.

Every major accomplishment in my life has been from prolonged effort, hard work, coupled with positive focus, thinking about the thing I wanted to accomplish. Pretty much to the point of obsession. Taking notes, writing down ideas, setting goals, and tracking my progress. Waking up early or staying late to work on it. Putting in the work day in and day out. The times in my life where maybe I didn’t accomplish much were all because I didn’t have a goal, and I didn’t have focused effort. Sure you get stuff done, but its no where near the same level of what you could have pulled off. Not even close.

I first started out with Postmark, which does seem like a nice service, but they require a manual verification to approve your app before sending will work. Since I setup my project over the weekend they wouldn’t get back to me until Monday, so I bounced. They later did approve me after the weekend was over and I explained to them what my app did (its an RSS reader), but by then it was too late. I totally get that they are just cutting down on spam, but not my speed, I had already moved on.

So I tried out SMTP2GO and it was super easy to sign up. You do need a non-gmail account though. Not a problem though as I use email forwarding to my gmail from hover (my domain registrar) for $5 a year. The only thing that confused me at first with SMTP2GO is that they don’t use API keys for email sending. Instead you setup SMTP Users with a username and password and use those when configuring your app to send email. Not a problem at all, just different than what I was used to with SendGrid and Discourse has support for it.

SMTP2GO will allow you to send 1k emails per month on their free plan. So if you need a good email sending service for your next app definitely check out SMTP2GO.

No doubt inspired by The Primeagen #461 Lex Fridman podcast episode, but not wanting to commit hundreds of dollars (just yet) I settled on getting the mWave for Mac Mechanical Keyboard from Kinesis as it was only $119.95 instead of $300+.

I wanted one because I could tell how wonky I had to hold my wrists to type. While I don’t think I have any wrist issues yet that I’m aware of I wanted to prevent any future issues and get something way more ergonomic.

When I first got it the biggest issues was the ‘b’ key. Apparently I used to type the ‘b’ key with my right hand. The ‘b’ key though is on the left side of the split keyboard. To make it even worse though the ‘n’ key on the right side is extra long so I’m still pressing a key, I just don’t always it isn’t the ‘b’ key. After a week though I appear to be adapting quite nicely though to that change.

Using a regular keyboard no longer feels as comfortable now. So ya it might be really hard to ever go back now. I’m sure my future only has more even more extreme split layouts. It’s only going to get worse from here on out. I do like this keyboard though, and hopefully I stick with it for quite some time.

One thing I think I would like is blue switches that are a little bit more tactile, but these browns are probably more appropriate for an office environment. I work from home though and I want maximum loudness.

If you haven’t tried out a split keyboard before I strongly encourage it. Your wrists will thank you.

Out of the box Neovim doesn’t have great markdown support. Of course you can just start typing a markdown file, but navigation with the keyboard is very difficult and there also is no wrapping of text so lines are really long. In this post I’ll walk you through some of the changes I have made to make it easier to work with markdown in Neovim.

I’m getting back into using vim more and I do really enjoy using it for writing. I like the aesthetics of writing in a terminal because if gives me typewriter vibes, but actually more like I’m writing on an old PC that doesn’t even have a GUI. Something about the focus of only your words on the screen and keyboard are magical.

Wrapping and Navigation

I used to hard wrap lines in vim at 80 characters so that I didn’t have long lines and so that I could easily navigate in vim using j/k. I found that I don’t like messing with the line breaks like that though especially if I have to paste the markdown into some other app.

What you can do instead is to use soft wrapping based on the terminal window size (or tmux pane). Then to fix navigation you can update these key mappings so that using j/k navigates per line and not the entire paragraph. 0 will take you to the beginning of the line and $ will you to the end of the line.

Here is the configuration I added to the ftplugin markdown.lua file:

-- ~/.config/nvim/after/ftplugin/markdown.lua
vim.opt_local.wrap = true
vim.opt_local.linebreak = true
vim.opt_local.breakindent = true
vim.keymap.set("n", "j", "gj", { buffer = true })
vim.keymap.set("n", "k", "gk", { buffer = true })
vim.keymap.set("n", "0", "g0", { buffer = true })
vim.keymap.set("n", "$", "g$", { buffer = true })

Spell Check

For spell check I’m just using the built in support and I’ve enabled it by adding these lines to the same markdown.lua file. This just enables spell check for markdown files and which spell “lang” file to use.

-- ~/.config/nvim/after/ftplugin/markdown.lua
-- ...
--
-- spell check
vim.opt_local.spell = true
vim.opt_local.spelllang = { "en_us" }

To fix spelling you can use these commands:

• ]s → jump to next misspelled word
• [s → jump to previous
• z= → suggestions for the word under cursor
• zg → mark word as good
• zw → mark word as bad

I’m sure there other things that I’ll add in the future, but with just these changes I’ve found writing in Neovim much more enjoyable and productive.

I’m not against trying Omarchy on some other spare computer I have, but for now I’m sticking with my trusty MacBook Pro for my main computer.

I’ve been pretty lazy lately with my dev setup and I have not been using vim, a fancy terminal, or any window manager. While things were working fine with my current setup I was definitely starting to feel the pain of managing windows when I had 5 different Cursor windows open, many different browsers open, and many different terminals. Basically it was super difficult to find the specific application window and using “Mission Control” was very messy. I even shared my screen once on a work call to demo something and my coworkers got to see a glimpse of the craziness of my work environment. I wasn’t really embarrassed by it, but it made me realized how chaotic my single mac workspace was getting.

I’ve been looking to improve my computer setup without feeling like I have to ditch my mac and switch to Omarchy even though it is the cool thing at the moment.

So how can you achieve the Omarchy like experience on macOS? I’m getting pretty far using only these 4 apps:

• Aerospace (a tiling window manager)
• Ghostty (a better terminal)
• tmux (a terminal multiplexer)
• Neovim (a terminal based editor)

Actually the only thing not included in Omarchy is just Aerospace, everything else like Ghostty, tmux, and nvim are included in Omarchy. Omarchy uses Hyprland for a window manager which is Linux only.

Aerospace

The first thing to setup is Aerospace a tiling window manager for macOS. This is the first thing that I’ve changed with my workflow and its been great. The learning curve for some basic commands has been minimal and I’ve able to keep all my windows organized and easily switch between them using a couple of key strokes which has been way faster and easier than using Mission Control and trying to find a specific application window.

Ghostty

I’ve been using iTerm2 for years now, but I did switch to Ghostty. That really hasn’t been a huge transition either and its been working great. The remaining two items tmux and nvim have quite the learning curve and I still have some setting up to do to get fully moved over to both.

tmux

While Ghostty has been easy to switch to, what hasn’t been super easy is using tmux inside of Ghostty. Mostly I just open a ton of terminal tabs inside of a single terminal window which I have been basically been doing inside of tmux, but it has also been nice to do some split panes which I want to get in the habit of doing more of. My leader key is also still the default ctrl+b which isn’t the easiest to always use so I might switch it to something like capslock. A couple of things you will need to configure for tmux is the ability to copy text out of the pane, scroll with the mouse, and also adjust the history-limit so that you can easily scroll through debug output like when using bin/rails s.

Neovim

Neovim has also been difficult to get fully up and running in so I’m still using Cursor at the moment for my development work. I initially did install the LazyVim distribution but found it to be way too much, so now I’m currently rocking a very vanilla Neovim setup with the lazy.vim plugin manager. I really hate that they are basically called the same thing, very confusing. I’ve used vim a lot in the past and was very used to my previous setup and plugin manager so switching to Neovim has actually been quite difficult as it seems way more complex than whatever I was doing previously with a single .vimrc file.

I also use homebrew as the macOS package manager, but I’ve always been using that so that wasn’t really anything to transition to.

And that’s my current developer setup on macOS. I’m sure I’ll keep expanding it to include more keyboard-everything options, but for now I’ve been pretty happy with my setup and sticking with my trusty MacBook.

UPDATE 2025-09-29

I just discovered this great post about dhh bashing on programmers who use Windows back in 2008. So not much has really changed. Just a different flavor of OS to hate on.

I absolutely love this quote in response which sums up exactly my original intent of this blog post:

Don’t waste time arguing about the character select screen. Results speak loudest. Show the world what you can do in your programming environment of choice.

The root issue is that your .bashrc file is returning early due to these lines that check if it is running “interactively” or not. So you can comment them out (lines 6-9):

   1 # executed by bash(1) for non-login shells.
   2 # see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files (in the package bash-doc)
   3 # for examples
   4  
   5 # If not running interactively, don't do anything
   6 #case $- in
   7 #    *i*) ;;
   8 #      *) return;;
   9 #esac