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Most of the problems are around photo processing. I’ve spent many (many!) hours learning and testing Darktable for RAW processing. It’s a powerful tool with a lot of clever ideas, some of which I actually prefer to its Mac counterparts. However, Darktable is not at all pleasant to use. Once the cleverness and new-shiny factors are past, I’m forced to live in a clumsy, awkward, unpleasant, unattractive environment. I miss Capture One dearly. Capture One gets me results I like quickly and easily. It’s better.

Then there’s scanning. I’ve spent years wrangling SilverFast to a point where I don’t hate it. Recent updates have introduced the feature of scanning multiple (3, in my case) frames at once, making it much faster. I used to use Vuescan, and it’s available on Linux, so I tried it. So so slow. And it does a pretty poor job with color film.

With digital camera scans, nothing beats Negative Lab Pro for doing inversions. NLP requires Lightroom Classic, so I’m kind of stuck there. I tried the Negadoctor feature of Darkroom and, while feasible, inversions are slow and tedious.

Photography is not just something tinker with occasionally. It’s my most enjoyable hobby. I don’t think I want to suffer through it, just so I can use Linux.

There are several other apps that I seriously miss from macOS. BBEdit is still unbeatable for ease of use, stability, and capabilities when it comes to manipulating text. Tinderbox is one of a kind for outlining and notes. There’s nothing on Linux comparable with OmniFocus for task management. And so on.

But the deal-breaking omission might be Messages. Everyone I communicate with regularly uses Apple Messages and Facetime, exclusively. I can’t stand typing on my phone, so having to hear an alert, grab my phone, and fumble my way through a reply is maddening. Also, I can’t quickly send people links or photos from where I am. How am I supposed to share that hilarious meme if it’s so much effort?

On the other hand, I love using the Framework laptop when away from my desk. I like the keyboard better than the MacBook Air’s. Knowing I can easily upgrade or fix things (inexpensively) for years is very compelling.

So all this to say that I may end up using a Mac on the desktop and Linux on the laptop. I swore I’d never do that again. Between sync, paths, filename case mismatches, and wildly different key bindings, using both is a royal pain in the ass.

This rambling post is just me working through all of this. I’m typing this post using BBEdit on the Mac Mini, and I gotta say that having the standard Emacs keybindings everywhere is a compelling case for macOS for me.

I’ll keep you posted.

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Well, it’s been fun. I suspected it would be, because I’ve been living in a terminal on and off for decades now. It’s not as if terminal apps are new to me. Diving back into them has been a blast.

But here’s the thing. Once the novelty wears off, it can become a bit tedious. I love being able to use the keyboard for everything. I just don’t want to have to use the keyboard for everything all the time. Sometimes I want to kick back and mouse around for a while. I’m finding that this comes up more often than I expected.

Another drawback to everything-in-a-terminal is that everything looks the same. My email, my notes, my tasks, my files, everything. It’s a bunch of similar rectangles and it can become kind of boring.

So, right now, I have mixed feelings about the whole enterprise, but I’m sticking with it for now. Today I’m going to see if I can get LazyVim to calm down and just let me write instead of trying to tell me how to write. (It’s probably the whole LSP integration thing).

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By default, jrnl writes entries to one big text file, so it seemed suitable for this purpose.

It’s only been a day or two, but I kind of dig using jrnl for the kinds of quick logging I normally do in Emacs. It automatically adds timestamped headings, handles @tags, uses human readable date entry (e.g. “last wednesday”), allows searching by tags or date range or content, and exports nicely to various other formats.

I might also include the entries I usually put into org-journal. I can’t imagine jrnl taking org-journal’s spot, but it’s worth trying. I’ll tag those entries as @journal and then I can export just those to markdown for conversion to PDF and printing, as one does.

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Here’s how I did it:

# Keybinding for floating centered terminal
bind = SUPER SHIFT, J, exec, alacritty --class floating-term -e jrnl --config-override editor ""
windowrulev2 = float, class:(floating-term)
windowrulev2 = center, class:(floating-term)
windowrulev2 = size 800 60%, class:(floating-term)

This gets me a conveniently sized and placed terminal window with jrnl waiting for me to type whatever I want. A simple CTRL-d and it creates the jrnl entry and the window goes away.

The jrnl --config-override editor "" bit forces jrnl to wait for stdin so I can just start typing.

It may be overkill, since I could just type jrnl in any terminal, but this is just a smidge more convenient.

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