KISS Me

...out of the bearded barley.

Oh dude, I love that song! But... this post isn't about that. This post is about the very simple acronym...

Keep It Simple, Stupid

Okay, so I actually have a gripe in this general area. It's late 2025 right now, and Apple have just recently come out with iOS version 26 which... first of all, love the new versioning strategy. Version 26 being relative to the year ahead is a great idea. Apple iterate on the OS frequently enough that this makes sense; going forwards you'll always know, by version number, roughly when a release came out. My gripe though is the ugly goddamn liquid glass effect on everything. The dang thing visibly lags, it makes the UI less readable, and I... I can't turn it off or change it in iOS 26.0 but apparently it's possible in 26.1 (released a few days ago). Okay, downloading that now!

I know I sound like an old man yelling at clouds here, and genuinely I don't think liquid glass is ugly in an aesthetic sense--it's pretty--but when it appears to stutter, when it makes the search bar and various buttons harder to find, this makes for an ugly experience.

Outside of my phone--here on my website, or at home on my computer desktop--I've been moving in a very different direction. I've been doing away with all the bells and whistles, any unnecesary glitz and glamour, and I've been trying to reduce my user experience down to the simplest possible case.

Take a look at my website (if you're reading this, you're probably there). As I write this, my website is a simple white-on-black (or black-on-white if you aren't using dark mode) with little more than a title, some navigation links and a narrow column in which we show the body of a document. It's lean, almost ludicrously so, but it's functional and highly readable. As the developer, it's also incredibly easy for me to adjust. At the time of writing for instance that narrow column is aligned all the way to the left on larger screens, with empty space to the right. You might notice this alignment on mobile too if you view the site horizontally. I'm debating whether or not I want to change that. The look is very familiar to me, a software developer who spends a lot of time in the terminal with a left-aligned command prompt--I am forever looking left on my own screen--but I do wonder about the general user experience. I might modify that with a simple margin: 0 auto;, which will automatically size the margins either side on the X-axis and center the document. And because there's nothing fancy going on here right now (we've got no fancy backgrounds, no sidebar), I don't have to worry about that simple change breaking some other part of the document flow.

Simplicity means adaptability.

By starting with something extremely minimalistic, we avoid all sorts of headaches about interoperability and will changing this affect that, do I now need to fix something else, and so on, and so on.

I've adopted a similar approach to managing my desktop operating system too, having moved recently from a Windows environment with an Ubuntu sub-system to just... Arch Linux. Just Arch, which is not "simple" in the sense that it's easy to set up, but is simple in the sense that it gives you the minimal amount of setup. It's easier then to load or swap between different desktop environments or window managers, because there isn't one provided by default. You don't need to work out how to replace the default or if any particular widget is going to disrupt the layout in any way, because there is none. You're tailoring the experience from scratch, from the minimum.

I've also moved away from fancy, modern code editors and IDEs like Virtual Studio Code and... I'm just using Vim now. Neovim actually, which is a fork of Vim (still minimalist by default) with a better ecosystem and stronger language for plugins and extensibility.

When I first gave Neovim a shot, I actually used a premade setup--the popular option appears to be LazyVim but I went with LunarVim--which provided a more IDE-like experience. I've gotta say though... I don't recommend this. I didn't like the experience. If you're moving from a modern IDE with a lot of mouse usage, the Vim approach is already going to be a lot to learn and these premade IDE-like packages just stack even more on top of that which you'll need to learn too. It's a little overwhelming. That's why I uninstalled LunarVim and I instead started using the barebones, the minimal, Neovim as it came. And I recommend doing this; I recommend getting comfortable with navigating using the keyboard, entering and exiting the visual and insert modes, learning a few vim motion shortcuts and when you find yourself asking how do I add this feature? only then go looking for the plugin or config which enables that. I now have a couple-dozen plugins, each of which addressed a specific need as it came up. And because I installed these one at a time, I was able to configure the keybinds and learn them as I went.

Hell, I'm actually thinking of removing a plugin right now. Telescope is an immensely popular plugin for fuzzy search and regular expression searches of your files, but... outside of Neovim, I also have an terminal program called Television which achieves the same thing and which I can persist in a separate tab rather than lose the Telescope floating window buffer. It's a case of... Neovim was my tool for this job, but now I may have found a better way. The same thing happened previously with file-exploration. I had been using nvim-tree, which provides a file tree view in a sidebar within Neovim, but I've since moved onto using oil.nvim (which isn't as great for exploring your files, but is a phenomenal way to edit them), Harpoon (which allows me to effectively favourite some of my files to quickly jump back to them, and has an oil-like editable buffer for this list of "favourites"), and outside of Neovim I'm using Yazi to explore my file-system with Vim-like key bindings. It's all just very simple, and very modular, and...

Almost accidentally, I'm embracing the Unix philosophy. This is the idea essentially that each program should do one thing, and do it well. It should accept inputs from another program and it should output something usable by another. So here I am exploring my file system in the terminal, instantiating complex searches there and opening the found files and directories in my terminal-based editor, each program doing one thing and doing it well, then allowing me to take the outputs of one into another. For a while, I was attempting to get Neovim to try and do all of this, but it's just not the best tool for some of those jobs. Keep it simple, stupid! Neovim is a great editor! Television is a great search utility! Yazi is a great file explorer! tmux is a great multiplexer! And when you get these things to work together, it's a beautiful experience.

I love that Arch Linux required me to build my user experience from the ground up, by providing only the minimum. I love that the basic Neovim installation did the same thing. In fact I'm almost a little frustrated that my chosen terminal emulator, Kitty, does a little too much, some of which has started to get in the way of shortcuts I've wanted to create to other utilities. If it weren't for the Kitty Graphics Protocol, I'm pretty sure I would switch to Alacritty right now, a terminal emulator celebrated for its minimal feature-set. Alas, I do love seeing image previews in my terminal (a small but nice convenience when exploring my file-system in Yazi or adding images to a document in Neovim). I can, I'm sure, configure Kitty to disable whatever is getting in my way... but oh my god, the Kitty config file is a lot! Almost 3000 lines! Yikes...

In the meantime, do you know what iOS version 26.1 got me? Basically nothing. There is now a setting to enable a "Tinted" version of the liquid glass design pattern, but this has made no perceptible difference so far as I can see... I'm wondering if the feature is bugged, because I'm genuinely still seeing all of the UI elements as transparent as they ever were. Frustrating; even simplicity isn't simple on iOS right now...

Ah well.

I will in future write some more structured posts about some of my setup and how I'm embracing the Unix philosophy and the KISS mantra. Because this is a pattern I very much like, and I'm going to be slowly tweaking absolutely everything to my specific liking.

That's it for now though. End of post.

Strike up the band and make the fireflies dance, silver moon's sparkling...

So kiss me.