You’ll probably want to skip ahead if you already know what Mastodon is. Mastodon is a Twitter-like microblogging service. Where it differs from Twitter is that it is a decentralized service, i.e. there is no central place where all toots (the equivalent of tweets) from every user in the Mastodon universe, also known as the Fediverse, live. Instead, your toots live with one instance of Mastodon, the instance that you signed up with.

For quite some time now, I have been writing a command-line-based personal task manager, mostly as a hobby project where I plough forward with my learnings about computing, programming, and the science behind them. I have decided to start writing about it, and make it a habit writing down my learnings, my findings, my rationale, my reactions, etc. I think it would make for a good record of what I have done, tried, and experienced.

First to give a brief coverage about the origins of Enpitsu. The name enpitsu is the romanization of the Japanese word 鉛筆(えんぴつ), which means pencil. I figured that I wanted a simple name for the tool, which sort of acts like a trusty pencil used to jot down things to do. I wanted the tool to be simple to use, to understand, and to build.

Foreword

Inspired by this post on Reddit on someone else’s workflow, I decided to kick things up a notch and bring even more of the similar ideas on board. There will be many parts of which may take a lot of effort to emulate, but hopefully this in-depth plunge into my setup can give you ideas on how you can make your own experience of using and writing in LaTeX more enjoyable.

This is not your tutorial to how to use LaTeX. I do not proclaim myself a pro at LaTeX at this point, and so I do not think I am eligible to write a even an introductory passage to using LaTeX. You are free to ask me how to do certain things and I’ll gladly answer them to the best of my abilities or point you to the right resources.

Due to how I use my computer and the nature of my setup, here are some knowledge that I expect the reader to know or be familiar with before delving forward.

• familiarity with the command line (cli) and terminal environment is required; and
• basic familiarity with how LaTeX and TeXLive works;
• basic familiarity with regular expressions (pattern matching and groups);
• already have TeX installed on your system.

It has been slightly more than I year that I have started using $LaTeX$. As I gain familiarity with the typesetting language over this time, I have also gained more confidence in dealing with its package management and locations of its files and folders. Now, I have a workflow and environment that I am relatively happy with.

This was a fun thing I was doing by the side and thinking it would be pretty neat to have a music player right from my terminal, with hotkeys that allow me to blaze through my playlists and library. That was definitely something that iTunes could not do, not without clicking all over the application, fumbling through your songs that has the same title and cover art but of different versions or different instruments, which I would usually append with something like (violin) or (piano) to the title, over the tiny dropdown from the search bar. To clarify, I do not dislike the iTunes app. I used it very frequently, and I use an iPhone. It is a decent app, but not particularly great.

My interest for optimizing webpage load times in my own projects were first found when I used to have wallpaper-sized images loading in every page of my old blog when I was much younger (yes the remains are still visible). I was not aware of the problem at first, attributing the problem to my slow internet connection, until when I invited others to my blog and they too noticed the problem. It was not an immediately visible problem unless if you stayed long enough on the page to notice that the header wallpaper was a timed event that changes every few seconds. And if I remember the structure correctly, it fetches images from an array of url to display the images, i.e. I have been sending infinite requests to fetch these images when you simply are staring at a single page, perhaps not even looking at the header. My inexperience and lack of knowledge had brought upon quite the disaster (laughs).

I have long developed the habit of keeping handwritten notes for my studies. Even today, I still hold onto my notes for Calculus from more than 3 years ago. But as I continue on further, it does seem more and more cumbersome to bring all of my finalized hard copies with me to wherever I move, even more so with my current nomadic lifestyle, switching between Co-op jobs and studies every term. And so I have decided to give $\LaTeX$ a try.