Tools I stopped using
An inventory of things I adopted enthusiastically and abandoned quietly, and what the pattern turned out to be.
Everyone writes the post about their setup. Nobody writes the post about what they removed, which is strange, because the removals taught me more.
Going through what actually fell out of my workflow over a few years, the reasons sort into three categories, and only one of them is about the tool being bad.
Tools that lost to a keyboard shortcut
Fuzzy file finders, project switchers, several launcher plugins. All good software. All replaced by learning the shortcut in the editor I was already in.
The pattern: a tool that saves you from learning something usually costs more over a year than the learning would have. Not always, but the exceptions are rarer than the marketing suggests.
Tools that needed maintaining
A custom shell prompt with git status, async loading, and three colour themes. A notes system with bidirectional links and a build step. A dotfiles repo with a bootstrap script for machines I set up twice a year.
Each of these worked and each needed occasional attention, and the attention arrived at times I had not chosen. The bootstrap script broke silently and I discovered it on the day I needed a new machine working.
Any tool that requires maintenance has to earn that maintenance every year, not once at adoption.
The shell prompt now prints a $. I have not missed the git status once, because
git status exists.
Tools that solved a problem I stopped having
This is the interesting category, and the one I keep failing to notice in real time.
A query profiler I used daily during a performance push, then kept installed for two years afterward. A dashboard for a service I no longer owned. A linter rule set tuned for a codebase I left.
These are worse than useless because they look useful. They were genuinely load bearing once, so the memory of their value keeps them installed long past the point where they do anything but add startup time and a config file to maintain.
What survived
Short list, and it is boring: the editor, git, a terminal, rg, jq, and a plain
text file for notes. Everything on it does one thing, has no config in my home
directory that I would miss, and has been maintained by someone else for over a
decade.
That is not a claim that minimal setups are superior. It is an observation that the tools which survived selection pressure all share a property, which is that they do not ask me for anything.
