On the path to investigating static site generators for my blog, I ran into a seemingly endless series of optimization tasks.

I installed 11ty, and the first thing I noticed is that my distro (Pop_OS!) has an outdated Node.js. That means I had to install NVM, (node version manager) to install and select the right Node version for the project.

So I grab the script, and realize, oh man, this is a Bash script, and I use the Fish shell. The NVM script needs to run in my shell before I can kick off the site generator.

So I started the optimization path of figuring out how to get NVM in Fish.

There was a project called Oh My Fish, just like Oh My Zsh, but that seems abandoned and no longer maintained.

There was a simple script that an individual created, but that required the installation of the Fisher package manager to load their NVM script. It came from a person’s personal Github repo. I decided not to go down that path.

So, I fell back to manually invoking the Bash shell inside my vscode terminal just to kick off the npm commands. Ugh. A non-optimized path, but this seems to work.

Then, it struck me that if I’m going to have a few terminals open, to a few different places, I should figure out tmux, or, what about this Ghostty project? Ghostty seemed pretty appealing visually and performance wise.

So I get Ghostty installed from a .deb and… immediately it has a script error about the Fish shell integration. Apparently my distro has an older version of Fish, as well.

Solutions are to manually upgrade the Fish shell to a later version with the PPA repository (not ideal), fix the Fish script myself, or….

Here’s where I’m optimizing..

What if I switched BACK to the Z shell everywhere on all devices? I did use it for a while. I still use it on my Mac. But I’d have to convert my Fish aliases and my ssh-agent scripts back to Zsh.

5 hours of watching Z shell YouTube videos later, falling down the rabbit hole of Starship, Powerline10k, and fuck, did I just watch a 2 hour Neovim tutorial? Am I considering Arch, or NixOS? What the hell just happened in my brain?

What was the original task I meant to do?

I think this Yak is well and truly shaved now.

So a few days have now went by and I’ve switched everything to ZSH and Oh My ZSH. I know I could do something like zinit, or even just do all my own custom includes, but with this, the addition of zsh-autosuggest, and zsh-syntax-highlighting, I now have effectively what my old terminal provided. Let’s insert a screenshot.

Look at that, there is even some productivity! I can run the bare bones version of my generator with a few test blog posts.

I fell down the rabbit hole of theming next, and remembered that I do love a good Catppuccin Mocha. So I setup my Ghostty theme, changed my existing WordPress, and started reading about how folks do modern CSS.