If you spend all day in the terminal like I do, you come to appreciate it’s speed and efficiency. I often find myself in Terminal for mundane tasks like navigating to a folder and opening a file; it’s just faster to type where I want to go than it is to click in the Finder, scan the folders for the one I want, double-click that one, scan again… small improvements to the speed of my work build up over time. The speed is increased exponentially with the correct configuration for your shell, in my case, zsh.

Computers, the bicycles for the mind, the idea engines; when we work at a computer we open the door to limitless avenues of creativity. Cracking open the lid of a laptop can be the first step to writing a novel, starting a new career, or getting in touch with long lost friends. But, when the machines misbehave, when they don’t perform as expected or present their interface in ways that are difficult or impossible to decipher, even the most mundane of tasks become a chore. The possibilities for the future melt away under the perception that computers are difficult and unreliable, our untrustworthy opponent to getting things done.

The recent row over iA Writer’s developers and their patent application reminded me what a small community the Mac developers are. The real problem was never about iA attempting to patent their work, the issue was that they forgot their place in the ecosystem. There are a few in the community that give freely and abundantly, like Brett Terpstra, and when iA threatened to use their patents offensively against Terpstra’s Marked, the community rightfully condemned them.

Like the good doctor, I knew as soon as I saw Bigfoot that I would be adding it to this site. ¹ I’ve avoided footnotes up till now because the HTML formatting for them seemed far too fiddley, and the Jekyll Markdown processor I was using did not support them.