My/Principle/Simplify/Prefer Standards and Defaults/Discussion

• Examples

  • config file names

    • Ghostty documents ~/.config/ghostty/config as its default config path; a nix-era setup had produced config.ghostty, which happens to work but is the undocumented variant
    • choosing the documented name means the layout is predictable from Ghostty's own docs — no archaeology required

  • default locations

    • I use ghq's default root of ~/ghq rather than customizing it
    • "what's laid flat cannot be knocked over" (Book/Tao Te Ching) — everything we do to customize a setup also decreases its utility to others and, in a sense, the "power" of the configuration

  • canonical config formats

    • the dotfiles tool-canonical-config-format spec: when a tool rewrites its own config (e.g. Lazygit config migrations), store the chezmoi source byte-for-byte in the tool's canonical output form rather than fighting it

  • use default keybindings in tmux

    • a tip from Person/Mischa van den Burg - only rely on the default tmux keybindings, dropping customizations that are merely convenient (like ctrl a prefix), because they are not available everywhere. if I SSH into a server that doesn't have my customizations during a prod event, then I need to know the default tmux keybindings, so I might as well stick to the defaults.

• Why

  • idiomatic usage makes a setup legible to future-me and to anyone (or any agent) who already knows the tool — the tool's own documentation becomes documentation for my setup
  • defaults are the most-tested, most-supported path; departures rot as tools evolve
  • this is Software/Engineering/Principle/Convention over Configuration (Person/David Heinemeier Hansson's framing from Ruby/Rails) applied to personal tooling: routine choices belong to the tool's conventions; my configuration should carry only my actual exceptions
  • see also My/Principle/Simplify/Create Uniform Interfaces — a tool's idiom is a uniform interface, maintained by someone else for free

• tension

  • defaults can conflict with other principles (e.g. a default that scatters state outside XDG paths); when they do, the other principle may win — but the departure should be documented as a deliberate exception