GoKawiilFor the first time in twenty-five years I’m sitting in front of a computer where almost every program I touch was designed by me. One tool at a time, the off-the-shelf option got swapped out for something a little closer to how my hands wanted to work. (I wrote about the start of this a couple of weeks ago — that post laid out the early swaps; this one is the view from the other side of the journey.)
It’s been a crazy few weeks guiding Claude Code inbetween all the other stuff I’m doing in life. I direct CC, it works while I do other stuff. I get a second or few in between tasks, and I respond. Then off it goes adding features or hunting bugs.
Two suites in a happy marriage: CHasm, the bedrock — pure x86_64 assembly, no libc, the layer that paints pixels and reads keys. Fe₂O₃, the application layer in Rust, sitting on a small shared TUI library called crust.
The CHasm layer (assembly)
Role Was Now Window manager i3-wm tile Status bar / tray i3bar + conky strip + asmites Screen locker i3lock bolt Terminal emulator kitty glass Login shell zsh → rsh bare File viewer less show
The Fe₂O₃ layer (Rust on crust)
Role Was Now Text editor VIM scribe File manager ranger → RTFM pointer Email / RSS / chat mutt + newsbeuter + various web logins kastrup Calendars Google + MS web tock Astronomy panel astropanel astro Movies / series IMDB-terminal watchit
What’s left? WeeChat for IRC and other chats. Firefox — the only GUI program I still use regularly. That’s it. Everything else is mine.
The vim line
Let me get a bit sentimental about vim, because vim was the one I thought I’d never replace.
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