 Wagey it's bright and early on Monday morning my favorite day Anyway, so in this video I want to talk about Minimalist software a recurring theme on my channel, but a lot of people think that minimalism is a big joke It's a big meme. It's a big purity spiral. It's a big joke that people do for no reason like they want to use software That's hard to use just for their own. I don't know difficulty or something in this video I want to explain why minimalist software is more practical and it's a better long-term investment Sometimes even if you have to make a little personal sacrifice Now on my channel one thing that I've done a lot of videos on I don't know if so many of my current views or viewers have seen them But one thing that I've done a lot of videos on is document formatting now Those of us who aren't word cucks have many different ways of producing documents for example I think the industry standard most Technical papers are usually written in law tech or something like this or some some other kind of tech variety Which is pretty bloated compared to different things. I mean it's much bloated than more bloated than plain text But that's not really an option But many of you may often know that I've actually done a recent series on graph Which is a much more traditional much more minimalist way of doc formatting documents Now it is light years faster like yeah light years fast. You know what I mean? It is significantly faster It is much more Extensible, but it also doesn't do as much as law tech But there's even more stuff so law tech is all over the place nowadays, but there's new stuff like Pandoc and Well, not so new but there or there's stuff like people want to Because the law tech syntax is so bad despite it being powerful They want to be able to write the design extra layers of software to go on top of it for example, so you can write in markdown, so I've done some videos on our markdown and videos on pandoc where you can write documents in markdown and use You know a either pandoc or using some kind of law tech engine to convert them to PDFs now I'll go ahead and say that this is not minimalist. I know a lot of people think that oh it's using markdown So it's minimalist, but that's not what minimalist is referring to markdown is simple I think it's pretty much the simplest markup language out there All things considered, but when you write something in markdown and convert it to a PDF Usually what's happening is you are writing it and you are using law tech. You are using some other kind of Document formatting service, which is incredibly huge. I mean if you install pandoc, that's nearly a gigabyte of dependencies It's insane. Law tech is pretty much the same way if you want to do anything fancy Or if you're doing something something like our markdown, you have to have all of that junk including our and Yeah, it's just enormous now for many users, I think they think of Markdown or our markdown as being easier because you can just write You can just write in markdown and proceed from there But the the fact of the matter is what you're doing when you're using these services is that you are adding more and more and more layers of software that are just infinitely deep to do More basic things that if you know You might not like the syntax of a minimalist document format or like graph Which really is probably better than law tech anyway in terms of the syntax But you might not necessarily like graph, but the thing about graph is that Documents format instantly even if you have complex Bibliographies and references and stuff like that Because it you know, it's sort of a unix-based everything is a little tool or whatever that that functions together So why I say this this isn't just an issue of speed It's an issue of actually getting things done. Let me provide you an example Recently a couple months ago. I was writing a book you know just Writing a book specifically in our markdown, which of course is going to be compiled With a variety of law tech when you actually compile it So I was writing a book in our markdown and there was a point where I needed to insert an emoji character now Here's the funny thing. It's not very difficult to get an emoji in our markdown Okay, it's also not very difficult to get a an emoji in a law tech book that neither of those things are difficult but To get an emoji in a law tech book being compiled with our markdown, which is really just I mean It's nothing fancier than the other two things at the time was absolutely impossible now It might have changed But what happens is when you have all these different layers of software There was a particular due to the way that our markdown calls these law tech packages There was an incompatibility that I would either have to manually change packages to do or really just sit there Not being it be able to do anything So what happens when you add these extra layers of software is that things that you're supposed to be able to do you can't do anymore or And it's not just you there's no way of doing it They're unfixable to either an indie user or someone who might know a whole lot about it You know you basically have to wait for someone else to fix it now compare that compare that to graph in graph I also cannot insert emojis. I don't know how to do it. I think I think actually it's a post-grip problem I think if I compiled to some other kind of like HTML it might be easier But I don't know how to insert emojis in graph. I'll just put it that way But I feel better about graph because I Can't insert emojis in graph because the feature isn't there Okay, if I really wanted to add that feature I could do my research. I can make something and add it in Okay, but when it comes to bloated software where you have all of these different, you know these substrates of software on top of each other Constantly interacting in unexpected ways unexpected by you and unexpected even by the people who either wrote them or put them together What you have is you have errors that you can't fix and there's nothing really you can do about them and So what happens with something like? Has happened with something like our markdown is it's really nice You know, it's nice writing something in markdown and compiling it into a lock-tech document You know theoretically if you don't mind the extra time it takes up But as soon as you want to do something a little Different than just writing text it becomes I mean even something like just inserting a unicode character it can become incredibly difficult and Incredibly annoying in particular in very specific use cases. So of course, this isn't about emojis This isn't a bit about our markdown. This isn't about la tech This is about the fact that Nowadays people have this software philosophy where if they want to add something to our collective, you know Software repository so to speak they want to write stuff on top of old stuff So they're gonna take the the engines that already exist and build more engines on top of them When in reality what I there might be something like this out here But out there, but one thing I'd like to see is since people love markdown so much if someone just wrote a Markdown to PDF converter or post-script converter or something like that that just automatic not using la tech not using Pandoc not using you know any of these You know megabytes and megabytes or sometimes gigabytes of Dependencies if you just wrote a converter that turned x into y that would be nice But nowadays what you do is you convert x into a to b to g to z All the way to y and that's supposed to be like smart and it's smart if you say something like oh I wrote a system that you know Oh, I wrote a system that compiles markdown through Pandoc it through la tech through say a la tech through all these other things Into get a pdf that sounds smart, but it's stupid. It's really stupid and this is the problem with bloated software It's gonna break and it's gonna break in crazy unexpected ways So anyway, hopefully this has been sort of an explanation of the problem that I see in bloated software And when I started moving the things that were more minimalist sure sometimes it's just for the memes Sometimes you want to you know, you just want to see oh, can I minute can I actually get rid of this dependency? Can I actually live without this program? But you realize at the you know when you get to the end of it Things are much easier if you just specifically choose to use simple things another thing that I think I did a video one round a year ago on is Using scent one of the suckless tools to do presentations So if this is a really nice tool, it's supposed to be the equivalent of something like a Slideshow manager, you know like PowerPoint or something like this We're literally all you do is you write your you have a plain text file where every paragraph is going to be compiled as a slide and Everything appears pretty much exactly as you type it including spaces and everything else and I found it nice not just because it's simple or because it's small or the file sizes are small or You can just use any kind of text you want But also because it gets rid of the stuff you don't really need You don't need flashing Transitions and stuff in your slideshow sometimes, you know some sometimes not having features That's a good thing and and that's something you get you get focused on all these silly features when it'd be nicer It would be much nicer just to have programs that do a couple things and nothing else and you can predict how they're going to interact So anyway, that's all I want to say This might be a little more of an autistic boomer ransom woods video, but that's about it for today So I will see you guys next time