My .zshrc is older than some of my coworkers’ careers. Same with my .vimrc and my tmux config. They’ve grown into a carefully tuned system that does exactly what I want, and I’d be lost without them. The problem is that I run multiple machines. A laptop, a desktop, sometimes a throwaway VM for testing. Keeping all of that in sync used to be a pile of improvised hacks held together by hope. ...
Here is the payoff before the work: I plug in my YubiKey in the morning, type one PIN, and the rest of the day my authentication just happens. SSH to a server, no password. Sign a git commit, no passphrase. Pull a secret out of pass, just touch the key. One physical thing sits in a USB port and the friction is gone. Getting there cost me about three evenings of swearing at gpg-agent. Now that it runs, going back feels unthinkable. ...
For context on how my brain works, see Working with an AuDHD Brain. Here is the smallest version of my entire productivity system: task add "Write the intro" +next task 1 start That is it. The task is recorded, the clock is running, and I can see both in under a second without touching a mouse. Everything else in this post builds on top of those two lines. The stack is taskwarrior for task management, timewarrior for time tracking, and vit as a vim-style interface on top. Keyboard-first, terminal-native, plain text on disk. ...