Joshua Blais is back on the podcast, and this episode goes all over the place: Guix, Nix breaking, distro hopping, Emacs, Neovim, 34-key keyboards, home row mods, back pain, ADHD, Adderall, phone addiction, online presence, AI, spirituality, gratitude, community, and making money on YouTube.

We start with Linux and editor talk, including why Nix broke, what Guix is, why Joshua uses Emacs, whether he might go back to Neovim, and the difference between Doom Emacs and vanilla Emacs. Then we get into the ergonomic side of tech: back problems, chairs, keyboard placement, Colemak, concavity, 34 keys, where Shift goes on a tiny keyboard, ZMK, QMK, switches, and how keyboard choices affect your body.

The second half gets more personal. We talk about substance abuse, Adderall, the ADHD trend, putting your phone away, whether kids should have phones or tablets, trying to build an online presence while also wanting to go offline, monetizing YouTube, having a community, IRC, networking, AI, spirituality, gratitude, and whether the Luke Smith path is the right path.

Video:

https://youtu.be/btAOBkcLEkg

What’s the best way to support me?

https://linkarzu.com/about/#youre-a-fraud-why-do-you-ask-for-money-isnt-youtube-ads-enough

Timeline:

00:00:00 Highlights

00:02:25 What do you do for a living and what are the coaching sessions about?

00:07:06 How does it feel to work for yourself and not depend on a company?

00:09:46 Why cool hairstyles and looks every week?

00:11:17 Do you make significant money out of YouTube?

00:15:51 What is emacs-plus on macos?

00:16:50 What is the –with-native-comp install flag and is it needed?

00:17:58 How to install emacs as a macos user and why emacs 30?

00:19:52 Emacs –fg-daemon, what is it and why?

00:21:24 I deleted the .emacs.d directory and also created a symlink

00:25:25 Doom emacs, evil mode or vanilla emacs?

00:29:21 Why is Linkarzu trying emacs?

00:32:02 menu-bar scroll-bar visible-bell lexical-binding

00:34:52 How to disable the yellow annoying warning on Mac

00:39:30 Should I finish the emacs tutorial as a beginner?

00:42:17 Why do you use Home, PgDn, PgUp, End

00:45:35 macOS supports emacs keybindings by default

00:50:56 Why you use the arrows to navigate in emacs?

00:53:50 Install some packages, vertico, marginalia, orderless

01:04:58 What do you think of AI for learning emacs?

01:10:14 Install marginalia

01:14:40 M-x marginalia-mode to toggle marginalia

01:15:57 Modify savehist

01:18:15 What is orderless and how to install it

01:26:32 Thoughts on homerow mods, one shot modifiers

01:29:42 Bob gigalord kofi donation. What to talk in coaching sessions. Read superchats

01:33:37 Let’s continue with orderless

01:36:40 custom-file, export some config to another file and read from it

01:44:24 How to select text in emacs and configure delsel

01:48:35 Homework for next week, emacs tutorial, create an org file

01:50:58 This first video will be in the podcast channel, the rest in the normal channel

01:53:16 We’ll see you live next week