Before criticism ensues, let it be known that I love the macOS. I have used macOS for almost 8 years, on two 13-inch MacBook Pro’s. I love how I am free from the nightmares that I have had, as a much younger child, with Windows; I love that I have Retina Display; I love that I have a system that looks nicer than almost every other Window system that I have seen and come across; I love how I have, which I have come to learn later on, a UNIX-like environment, which enabled me to, and later on I did, learn how to work comfortably in a shell. As I came to own an iPhone, I enjoyed having iTunes and iCloud sync across my devices; no longer do I have to manually move music files into an SD Card for my phone, no longer do I think about leaving important notes on my computer while not being able to access them anywhere else (I have never owned an Android device, and I loathe the day that I have to use one).

I’m not someone that can really hide my excitement at seeing beautifully crafted setups; my last post about ncmpcpp is a proof of that. Well, sort of. I’ve dreamed of having my own setup for the longest time, although it is only until recently that I started to pay more attention to automation tools and tiling window managers. Of course, there are no tiling window managers that work natively on macOS, but that does not stop the community from coming up with ways to achieve that, giving birth to tools like Amethyst and Hammerspoon. I’ve used both for some time, didn’t really get attached to Amethyst, and Hammerspoon can only do so much with window management, although I still use Hammerspoon for that nice emoji selector.

This was a fun thing I was doing by the side and thinking it would be pretty neat to have a music player right from my terminal, with hotkeys that allow me to blaze through my playlists and library. That was definitely something that iTunes could not do, not without clicking all over the application, fumbling through your songs that has the same title and cover art but of different versions or different instruments, which I would usually append with something like (violin) or (piano) to the title, over the tiny dropdown from the search bar. To clarify, I do not dislike the iTunes app. I used it very frequently, and I use an iPhone. It is a decent app, but not particularly great.

I have long developed the habit of keeping handwritten notes for my studies. Even today, I still hold onto my notes for Calculus from more than 3 years ago. But as I continue on further, it does seem more and more cumbersome to bring all of my finalized hard copies with me to wherever I move, even more so with my current nomadic lifestyle, switching between Co-op jobs and studies every term. And so I have decided to give $\LaTeX$ a try.