Théoo

Since I was born in the early 2000s, I've been around browsers most of my life. The first one was Firefox, it was the one installed on the family computer and I didn't even know there were other browsers at the time. To be fair, there was no difference between the browser, the search engine and internet in my mind.
Then I discovered Internet Explorer while trying to kill the time at my grandparents'. I would play random flash games and watch let's plays of Mario Kart Wii on Youtube. At some point, Chrome replaced Firefox on the home computer which had since become a laptop, and would even replace my grandparents' trusty IE. For many years after that, all that existed was Chrome, maybe Safari for the odd times where I used a Mac at school or at some Aunt's place, but I knew no better.

Somehow along the path of my life, I ended up studying web development, and that's when the problems started. Because you see, before that, a browser was just a box with tabs that allowed me to access the internet, nothing more, nothing less. But then it became a tool, and a very important one as well, I wanted it to look good since I would spend most of my days there, but also to be fast and support many features. So at first I downloaded the three main browsers, to be able to test my websites properly, Firefox, Chrome and Safari, and I started to have preferences.
Safari was the sleek good looking one[^1], but so many websites would break when they encountered it and the dev tools sucked. Chrome was the web development beast, it didn't look too bad, its dev-tools were fantastic and it supported every feature under the sun, but it was run by Google... yuck. Firefox, was the ugly one, I hate how base Firefox looks, but at least Mozilla foundation felt less bad than Google or Apple and it supported most features with good enough dev-tools.
I was torn, constantly switching between the three for different tasks, never feeling at home anywhere and I wanted it to stop. So I started looking online for alternatives, and there were many.

That's when my browser frenzy got started, at some point I had 22 different browsers installed on my computer. There were the minimal ones like Min, the featureful ones like Vivaldi, Opera or Orion, the plethora of privacy focused forks, LibreWolf, Mullvad Browser, Waterfox, Ungoogled chromium, Brave, Throium,... a bunch of Vim inspired ones like Vieb or Qutebrowser. I even tried to use terminal based browsers like Lynx or w3m[^2] but quickly gave up on these. I was never satisfied, always looking for a good balance between privacy, my love for the keyboard and good looks. And that's when a new name started to rise discreetly, Arc.

See, Arc definitely didn't tick the privacy nor the keyboard centric box, but it had such good looks[^3] that I couldn't keep looking away. I had it laying on my computer for about a year, using it on an off, never feeling quite at ease, but then it grew on me. At some point I had accepted that what mattered most to me was the way my browser looked[^4] and the ease with which I could use it to develop websites over the privacy aspect. And so I became a happy Arc user, there was little to complain about, after so many attempts and years of searching, I finally had found a browser that I would stick with in the long run.

But then "The Browser Company" decided to stop working on Arc, and that sucked and this Arc breakup re-ignited my frenetic browser search. The novelty of Arc, with it's thursday updates had been able to keep my mind quiet, always having something new to try, but then I didn't have this safeguard anymore. So I went back to previous browsers I had really liked, Orion, LibreWolf and even Chrome... But the Arc way had poisoned my mind, not being able to open something in glance? No folders? No nice catchy animations absolutely everywhere? These had all become necessary things in my way of interacting with the internet.
Fortunately, great folks decided to create Zen. This browser ticks most of these boxes and it is also open source and more private. So I've been using it as my day to day browser for a while, but at the same time I'm still looking around for alternatives.
The thing is, now that I'm not blinded by Arc anymore, I realize that I actually don't fancy the sidebar that much. It's alright, but I love the look of top tabs and the usability of them. And of course, Zen team has already said that they don't plan to support top tabs, ever. "The Browser Company"'s new browser, Dia, could have been a great replacement, but even if it ever reaches feature parity with Arc, I still don't trust "The Browser Company" anymore and I hate the AI and the monetary aspect of it.

So here I am, stuck in this browser landscape, with so many choices but none that perfectly fits me. Maybe it's time I accept that nothing will ever be perfect, and to be at peace with using a browser that is more than good enough. To stop losing time switching and setting up different apps over and over again. I think that's a lesson for my life in general, stop wanting to always change things up, and be satisfied by whatever I have as long as it works.

• [^1]: Sadly, apple killed that statement with their liquid glass update 🫠
• [^2]: On which this webpage works really well btw.
• [^3]: Debatable opinion, but as much as I dislike "The Browser Company", their designers do a pretty dang good job.
• [^4]: Again, very debatable, I don't always feel comfortable with this opinion.

I love brushing my teeth.

The feeling of the hairs of the brush scraping on each tooth removing bits of food and undesirable stuff. The frothing of the toothpaste filling up your mouth more and more as you brush. The clean and minty taste that tingles your tongue, nose and eyes.

For me, it's a moment to reflect, a moment spent with myself in front of the bathroom mirror. A moment to prepare myself for the day ahead, to think about what I'm going to do, who I'm going to spend it with, what the weather will be like. It's generally the last moment before the day starts, 3 to 5 minutes after which I'm going to get engulfed in the movements of daily life.
Then, it's also a moment to wind down in a way. When after a long day, I'm once again faced with myself. It means "you are soon going to bed", it's a time to think about the day that passed, how it went, who I met, how did I feel, how do I feel?

Teeth brushing is a moment where no one will interrupt you. Because you are not going to walk around creating white sticky stains everywhere, because you are not going to talk and spit all over the other person's face, they wouldn't understand any of your gurgly sounds anyway.

I wonder why I used to hate brushing my teeth.

As a kid, I would do anything to avoid it. The toothpaste was stingy, it took precious time I could have used to play, it meant going to school, or going to bed, two activities my kid self despised heavily.
Maybe as a kid, I was simply more in the present moment rather than thinking about what was and what will be. These 2 minutes tops I would spend roughly scratching my teeth were a moment not spent having fun, and what can a moment spent not having fun be worth?

Rose colored sunglasses on my nose, I walk in the rain waving to the dogs I cross path with that reply by looking back happily with their tongue sticking out and their tails wagging.
I see a puddle, jump over it, almost fall in it then celebrate this new long jump world record.
The rain has stopped and I keep looking at the sky hoping for a rainbow to appear, don't see the red light and almost get run over, this felt like playing crossy roads.

Hear me out, life is the funniest thing ever, you just have to make it fun. The world around us is full of things that were designed for one purpose, but have so many more hidden ones.
See a small fence? Jump over it.
Follow pigeons around, yes they are slow, but they might take you to a random fun place.
A bus stop pole can quickly become a fireman's pole or just a bar to spin around like you are in some sort of musical.
Cartwheels are surprisingly has much fun as an adult as they were as a child. Don't believe me? Try it.
Raindrops on the windows are like dozens of races happening at the same time, which one will get to the bottom first?
Try to remember graffiti signatures and you'll find them in many different places, sometimes even in different countries.
Wear clothes just because you want to, even though it looks awful and even you agree.

The hard part is overcoming people looking at you weirdly, but that's ok, they are just not having as much fun as you are. And from my experience, none of them ever dares to confront you about it anyways, they must just think you are some sort of eccentric.
A thing that helped me with this is to think about who I remember I saw today when walking outside. And the answer is pretty much no one, we just don't care about the people we cross path with. We might remember them for 10 minutes but then they go to the empty abyss of useless brain stuff.

So please, next time you go out, put on your coolest pair of shades (yes even if it's not sunny) and have some fun. Just make sure you don't break or make anything dirty cause that's uncool.
I would love to hear about how you are making your life fun, so don't hesitate to tell me about it and have a great day!

I have been coding for a few years now, and in that time, I have done nothing but remove complexity from my coding setup and I feel like I've reached a point where I'm happy with it. My favourite editor is ed, but I can't really use it muc, therefore, I've settled on Neovim[^1]. I like the keyboard centric editing it offers, and it's actually really fun to use once you've mastered the Vim language. Neovim is a very capable editor, offering all you could imagine from modern IDEs (LSP, Autocomplete, Fuzzy finding, Plugins, Diagnostics,...), but I try to stray away from all these, keeping a very minimal approach to code editing.

The number one thing I don't have is a colorscheme. My code is black on white with a tiny bit of grey for comments, you might be thinking that this makes it hard to parse code and find what you want, but that's exactly the point. Since my eyes have few visual cues to grab onto, I've been forced to read the code to know what is happening, and that has in turned made me so much better at understanding and reading other people's code quickly. It also feels (to me at least) like my eyes are less strained after a day of working in black and white.

Another thing I don't use is autocomplete, neither the box that appears as you type or inline AI stuff like copilot. I've found that by removing these helpers, I actually had to learn the language I was writing my code in. Learn the order of arguments, the names of functions you only use ever so often, the names of the variables scattered throughout a project, and even namespaces[^2] of the packages installed on the project. Having the completion popup appear all the time was taking me out of my focus to read whatever it had to say and then validate it. Now I just write, without stopping, without breaking the flow. And it is often faster to do it this way rather than parse a list in a popup and select the right one.

I've also stopped using LSPs. This one was a hard choice, because LSPs provide 3 features that I heavily relied on: renaming, go to definition and file outlines. My solution to get rid of those is that I've started using grep or simply, my file finder. For sure it takes more time looking through a package's files to find out where a function is defined, but using ripgrep often makes it much quicker[^3] and I've found that searching manually through code allows you to learn the structure of the packages and over time, you get much better at using them. Another side effect of disabling LSP, is that I don't get squiggly lines when I make a mistake anymore. At first I thought it was gonna be a mess, that I would make so many typos or forget semi-colons and search for them for hours. But my brain quickly adapted, I started making less typos, and always keeping my eye on the back of my cursor to make sure I caught myself writing shit right away. I started double checking my code a lot more, to make sure there was no mistake, which often results in me finding ways to improve the code despite it being correct in the first place. You also become much quicker at finding the typos, your brain knows what common errors you make and searches for these in priority. And finally for the odd times where you can't find it, your language probabbly has some sort of linter you can run on the file that will tell you the problem.

So the only thing I've really kept aside from the ability to write text is a fuzzy finder that can search both file names and file contents[^4]. This is one of the most powerful features of my workflow, because since I don't have LSP to go to definition or other things like that, I use my fuzzy finder to navigate pretty much everywhere. But lately, I've slowly started replacing it with actual ripgrep and fzf in the terminal. When I do that, I also often use bat to preview the files and only jump in nvim when I know exactly what I'm going to modify. Another thing I use is Oil.nvim, it's a file explorer that works like a buffer, meaning you can edit the contents of directories, the names of files etc like if you were writing code. I don't have much to say about this, I just like it and have found it works better than NETRW[^5] for moving files around.

Outside of my editor, I use tmux, a terminal multiplexer which allows me to create many sessions for all the different projects. The terminal I use is Ghostty, it is fast, looks good and that's all I really need from a terminal. For git stuff, I'm a big fan of GitHub Desktop, because its GitHub integrations are on point and it simplifies many hard to remember git commands. My browser of choice is Zen but as I discussed in my blog post about browsers, I'm never really sold or satisfied with the browser I use.

That's it for my coding setup, it might[^6] change in the future, at which point I can write an updated blog post. But for now, I think that this pretty bare bones setup is good for me. It forces me to actually learn the programming languages I use and understand the codebases I work on, the more I code and the more I get a feeling for how code should be written, how to refactor better,... . If I had one change to really recommend from all the above, it would be to disable your autocomplete. I know that in today's coding landscape this is a weird advice with tools like Claude Code or Cursor where AI writes the code for us, but I swear that you will see improvements in your understanding of the code in very little time.

If you have questions, or want to share your coding setup, please feel free to send me an email, I would be pleased to read what you have to say ^^.

[^1]: A modern version of vim, scripted in lua and with a really active community. [^2]: Talking about PHP here, a namespace is this for example Theoo\App\Components. It allows your code to differenciate between two classes with the same name but under different namespaces. [^3]: --no-ignore-vcs my beloved ❤️ [^4]: I'm using Telescope. [^5]: Vim's default file explorer. [^6]: Will for sure