Workflow discussion

2026–04–12

So what makes a good workflow?

My main function for this work flow follows a couple of guidelines :

• Speed, everything should be one or two key presses away.
• Durability, everything must be consistent and resilient to changes.

So what are the specific aspects of the workflow that we have to optimize?

After experimenting with a few window management options like OXWM, DWM, and Hyprland I’d ultimately end up settling on i3. For a couple reasons :

• i3 is so simple to configure, DWM required tons of recompilation and was thus incredibly slow to iterate with. Whenever I wanted to test another change or breakout window it would require tons of patching and modification in Xephyr. I3 on the other hand allows for 90% of it’s config to be done on a singular file and it’s api is incredibly accessible for simple shell scripting to control the rest of it’s behavior.
• I dislike wayland because it’s too new for not much gain, the time I’d need to invest into learning wayland doesn’t seem to offer many real advantages. Sorry Niri fans
• The tiling on i3 just flows best with my way of thinking, especially with a small autotiling script I wrote. The manager allows for a great mix of program based workspace pinning, automatic tiling, and gaps / vanity features with picom

Tmux is used for 2 things, multiplexing in kitty and session persistence. I use the splitting in Tmux because it handles the text movements and artifacting even better than the native panes. But the main benefit of Tmux comes from it’s session persistence combined with searchable sessions. I write extensively about this in my post here

Using Neovim follows pretty intuitively. I am not smart enough to use emacs², and large electron based apps like vscode are terrible for battery, performance, and aura. So this leaves neovim as the main option. It’s near endless configurability has left allowed me to land at a config I find perfectly usable for nearly all applications. It focuses on simplicity, not breaking out to multiple subdirectories while coming in at under 400 LOC. This simplicity allows for quick remedies of breaking changes, which is not possible in larger projects like NvCHAD, and very fast boot times. You can find the repo here : Neovim Config.Note it requires the modern 12.0 standard and won’t be backwards compatible as it relies on the new vim-plug to simplify plugin management. The use of vim-plug may be slightly “suboptimal” in light of lazy loading solutions like lazy or what have you, but these complications don’t feel meaningful when you’re already dealing with sub 50 millisecond start times. Eventually I’ll release a write about about how I edit typst, C, C++ and do basically everything within my minimal neovim config.