Miskatonic University PressNoting for reference: Policy of transience by Simon Tatham, who wrote PuTTY. Some points: he doesn’t keep a shell history, regularly closes his browser, often logs out and shuts down his laptop, and uses a temporary file system in memory instead of filling up ~/tmp/ with stuff.
All the habits I’ve described above can be seen through this lens:
- My shell history is either temporary (vanishes when I close that shell), or deliberately permanent (saved a command in a script with a name and an explanation).
- A cluster of related applications on my desktop, like a terminal and a text editor and a gitk or something, is either temporary (I close the whole lot frequently and in any case it goes away when I log out or reboot), or deliberately permanent (if I keep wanting the same cluster a lot then I make hot keys and short command aliases to restart it any time I want).
- Files on my computer are either temporary (because they’re in ~/mem which will be emptied on the next reboot), or deliberately permanent (in a sensible directory so I’ll know where to find them again, and with an explanation if needed).
- URLs I want to do something with are either temporary (in my browser, which I keep closing down completely) or deliberately permanent (saved somewhere else, again with an explanation).
The file system in memory is new to me and bound to be useful. I may try not keeping a bash history—I can see how maintaining that constraint could lead to good habits. I’m already a great believer in regularly closing my browser, usually after getting back to one tab (my permanent one with email).