Getting focus back through esc-i and :wq

It seems like we're all looking for ways to get our focus back, our attention back, our priorities straight. Yet our attention span and our ability to focus, to enter a so-called flow, is constantly decreasing.

The syrens of social media contribute to constant distraction and procrastination. The urgencies of our families are drawing us to thoughts and worries which are not ours and that do not entirely belong to us. E-mails poppin' out of the blue in our ibox constantly attempt to engage us in activities we barely are aware of. Conference calls create new tasks for everyone, especially when you're on the supplier side and it seems like the client you're working with (or for) is not able to write a freaking document to justify a budget, hence you either do it for him/her or the project's budget will not be approved in time.

In times when attention is not only a scarse resource but is severely undermined by everyone's else priorities, how do we find a place to focus and think, ponder, create?

Well, I have my own trick.

It's called VIM.

Yep, the good old Vi editor, or VIM in it's most recent incarnation.

A piece of software written in the '70 by a chap whose name is William Nelson Joy.

William, or Bill for Vi's friends, is nothing less than the co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

William Nelson Joy, or Bill for Vi's friends, is a piece of the history of modern computing.

Did I say already that William is Bill for Vi's friends?

In my career in software engineering, I am one of the lucky ones that had the pleasure to work on Bill's SPARC workstations, running Sun Solaris of course, a BSD derivative, kinda like the grandfather of the Linux machine I am writing this article with.

I did heavily use Solaris at TIBCO - what a company! - in early 2000's and, coming from a Microsoft certification in C++ and MFC on Visual Studio, it surely did cause a bit of stress at the beginning. I was used to edit my C++ code in the comfort zone of a full-fledge IDE and suddenly got thrown into obscure code editing wizardry that required escape-key combinations for entering text and saving files. Not to mention moving around a file word-by-word using the W and E keys, or searching for text using regex.

It took me a good two months worth of questions and manuals readings to get over it. StackOverflow was far from being available in 1998, you had manuals, the man command or else.

Then, suddenly, something clicked.

The Vi thing clicked. I could edit tens of files in seconds without even looking at the keyboard. Without using my right-side of the brain. Vi became second nature.

Four or six terminal windows were the norm on the 22-inches CRT monitor on my desk in the TIBCO London HQ and on my trusty and rugged Toshiba laptop. Double hit "y" for copying, hit "p" for pasting. Ctrl-p for suggestions, slash for searching. Paired with *NIX commands like find and grep, Vi was waaay better that any editor I had ever used in my previous and cozy IDEs.

 Then, years passed by. C++ passed by. And Sun's Solaris. And UNIX.

All replaced by the business-friendly Microsoft .Net framework and, in 2009, the mobile revolution.

Apple iOS apps in Objective-C and Android apps in, uhm, Java.

Apple's Objective-C got me entrigued. A lot! At the point that I went full steam on iOS and started a small project that actually became a worldwide hit and put me, a solo developer of my tiny company, in the spotlight on the US Apple AppStore with iAccounts, a password management app for early iPhones that got featured by Apple as one of the best 10 productivity apps in 2010.

Since the early days of iOS development, there is just one "right" enviroment to develop iOS apps and that's XCode. And it's actually a pretty decent IDE.

Now it's Linux. Because the world runs mosly on Windows and Linux servers. Actually, it seems that Linux servers are n the highest numbers, since you can even run Windows or the .Net framework on them. And they do great with containerization which is quite a trend.

Today, my daily driver is Ubuntu, running on a Ryzen 7 CPU with a pretty decent GPU and lots of RAM for my machine learning tricks. Almost fifteen years on Apple MacOS got me spoiled and Ubuntu Linux is not exactly like a Mac. You have to schedule for some babysitting. It sort of glitches from time to time. It's definitely not a Mac. And neither a Sun ultra-stable SPARC box. It's kinda like Windows NT. Stable, yet you get the occasional blue screen of death. In Linux the bluescreen equivalent is the sound card not working great after a while. Or a device driver acting funny when you connect your iPhone to recharge it via USB. Or system startup time increasing as time goes by.

Yet, the ability to work locally AND remotely on the same bash shell is, at least to me, pretty invaluable, therefore Linux. MacOS went ZSH and discourages any power-user approach. I need a power-user approach to my computer. I need to know what's going on with it. And I need to work as root, occasionally. I have waved goodbye to the Apple golden cage for good.

After almost 10 years spent on Macs, running Linux means I am now back using Vi when I code. I don't do it everyday, I spend my days at work on managing projects and coaching staff, but when I need to enter "the flow" and sort some weird stuff in our code, I fire up Vi.

It's such a second nature that I've even started using it as a word processor for writing specs or commercial offers.

I mean, business documents.

Whatever the scope, the content, the audience, when I need to focus and gather ideas, all my first drafts are always entered in Vi. Preferably with white chars on a dark background and in a pretty small terminal window. No music. No phone. No e-mails. No side thoughts. No distractions. More often than not, the only background noise is the the clickety sound of a pomodoro timer counting the minutes from the next break, the next small walk, the next glass of water, the next phone call.

A little magic happens in that 80x25 chars window. It's called FLOW. It's the state of complete attention and focus, a place of creativity. Undisturbed. Magnetic. Cathartic.

Uh, the pomodoro went off.

Which means that I'm done for this post.

See you around.

I'm now gonna hit : w q and save the this stuff.