Assumed audience: Other people who are comfortable writing (even very small!) scripts and programs.
I built a tool last week which fully automates my process for archiving current set of notes to GitHub. The process is basically trivial in the first place: I could mostly do it with a single chained shell script invocation using cp and rm and git. But wrapping it up into an actual program I can invoke — in my case, written in Rust because that’s how I roll — made it a much nicer experience. (It could equally have been a shell script, but I really hate writing shell scripts.)
It’s a small thing, but I love that this workflow looks like this now:
$ notes-sync
Cleaning things up...
Copying from /Users/chris/Notes...
Committing changes, if any...
Pushing any new changes...
🎉
This is just nice. Much nicer than the output from the original shell output which did the same thing!
I had fun and learned something building that little tool (in this case, about the gitoxide family of crates). I also control the whole thing end to end, and have a foundation I can use to make further changes or improvements to that workflow over time. That means I am not subject to the opinions or changes made by some other tool author — there are, after all, Obsidian plugins which do something similar, and that is great so far as it goes; but I want things to fit my workflow instead of adjusting my workflow to fit someone else’s ideas.
I have increasingly started to come around to the idea that as a rule I will build small tools for myself this way. It sometimes takes more time… but I often find that it only takes more time up front, and often takes less time in the long term. It’s usually a fun way to learn some new API or practice a new technique. Most of all: it makes my computing environment mine.1
If you can: build yourself your own small tools.
Notes
This is, in many ways, one of the very best thing about computers: you can make them into an environment which fits your own wants and needs. Different people love different parts of this. I do not care about tinkering with my desktop environment, per se; other people do. That itself is one of the small joys of modern computing, though: If you want to run in the constrained environment of iPadOS because it just does its thing with a minimum of fuss (whatever its limitations), you can; If you want to customize your tiling window manager to and font rendering stack on a custom fork of the Linux kernel, you can. ↩︎