The Principles of System Crafting

• I’ve been experimenting more with god-mode and meow this week. Videos coming soon!

• Support the channel!

  Buy me a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/SystemCrafters

  Buy Mastering Emacs with this link: https://www.masteringemacs.org/r/systemcrafters

Sneak peek: https://new.systemcrafters.net On Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/SystemCrafters/systemcrafters-site

Lots of links are broken right now! I’m still in the process of rearranging all the old show notes into new

Goals

• Produce written guides for various topics
• New videos will be made to supplement the written text
• Much faster to add new content, easier to keep up to date!

Today I’d like to try and codify the “principles” of system crafting. Why? As part of the new System Crafters website, I want to develop the content of the site in a way that helps readers to adopt these principles and take control of their computing experience!

I’ve got a set I’ve already thought of but I’d love to hear your suggestions for additional ones to add:

• Software that you can depend on
• Values are aligned with yours
• You are free to modify and extend!

Things like GNU Emacs, GNU Guix, Linux, coreutils, GCC, etc.

Permissive Open Source licenses like MIT, BSD, etc are also OK!

• Plain, human-readable and editable text
• The ideal: configuration is code
• Use plain-text for your personal files: Org Mode, Markdown, .txt, Ledger/hledger etc
• Source control for file history and syncing

Org Down: https://karl-voit.at/2021/11/27/orgdown/

Text-centric, keyboard driven interfaces are typically more efficient!

• File browsers
• Mail clients
• Social (chat, Fediverse, etc) clients

What about nice-looking graphical tools?

• Node-based editors are valuable when you want to see the flow of a graph at a high level
• Other visualizations like org-roam-ui can be useful

Your life will be easier if you can build a configuration that lasts!

GNU Guix and NixOS are great tools for this.

Perhaps there are others? Ansible?

• Matrix, XMPP, and IRC
• E-mail!
• Collaboration (Codeberg, Sourcehut, etc)

This doesn’t mean write whole programs, but write scripts and extensions to existing programs.

• /bin/sh
• Emacs Lisp
• Guile Scheme
• Python

Don’t depend on proprietary cloud appications!

• Host your own Git repositories over SSH!

Sharing the tools you make is nice, but it’s even better to share what you learn!

Also, writing down what you learned in a blog, or even in a journal, will help you to remember what you had to do to solve a problem!

Contribute documentation and fixes to the things you use!

Over time, ARM and RISC-V machines will get better and better. It can be better to use these architectures because of openness, availability of open source drivers and firmwares, etc.