Most people see a blank page and look for a toolbar. I see a buffer and look for a way to transform it.

Welcome to Plaintext & Perspectives.

For a long time, the world tried to convince me that “writing” meant navigating nested menus, fighting proprietary formats, and letting a GUI decide how my thoughts should look. Even in the technical world, there’s a pull toward heavy environments that try to do everything for you in the form of IDEs.

I’ve decided to move in the opposite direction.

The Shift to Modal

For the past decade or so, I’d traded the all-encompassing nature of older setups for the sharp, focused efficiency of Vim. There is something honest about modal editing—the realization that we spend more time navigating and refactoring than we do typing new characters.

Why SSG?

This blog is built with Hugo, a static site generator (SSG), for the same reason I use grep, awk and sed: it does one thing exceptionally well. It takes plaintext and transforms it into a lightning-fast site without the overhead of a database or a heavy runtime.

What to Expect Here

This isn’t a blog about local news or “Word” tutorials. This is a digital smithy for those who:

  • Prefer grep over “Find and Replace.”
  • Find beauty in a well-crafted Regular Expression.
  • Believe that the terminal is the most powerful creative tool ever built.

If you’re here for the “how” and the “why” of a minimalist, text-driven life—welcome home.

:wq