== I am not a (Unix) purist

Someone from outside looking at my environment and what I use and do
might think that I'm a Unix purist; after all, I use [[an odd and
limited shell ../sysadmin/NonstandardShellAdvantage]], [[a stripped
down and custom desktop environment ../sysadmin/MyDesktopTour]], and I
persist in reading my email with [[MH ../sysadmin/ToolsEmail]] ([[which
is a very Unixy thing in the abstract MHTragedy]]) instead of a modern
IMAP client. I could go on, but I think you get the general drift.
That impression would be a mistake. I am not really a Unix purist.

Oh, I certainly have a tinge of it (along with the upturned nose that
goes with it, which I try not to let show much these days). I feel
genuine attraction to the ideals of Unix and much of their embodiment.
But ultimately I'm a pragmatist who is interested in getting things
done, not an idealist. I use all of the minimalistic, Unix-purist things
that I do because they work well for me, not because I'm intrinsically
opposed to their alternatives and refuse to touch them because they're
impure.

One consequence of this is that I'm perfectly happy to depart
from the straight and narrow path of Unix minimalism and purism
when the result works better for me. I have [[in the past
../programming/MyEmacsProblem]], I do right now in various ways, and I
undoubtedly will do so in the future. It's just that I tend not to talk
about these departures because usually they're not interesting (because
non-minimalism is increasingly the default state of things on Unix,
[[for good reason UnixPhilosophyPurpose]]).

=== Sidebar: my latest non-minimal departure

As one might guess from [[a recent interest
../programming/ReadlineQuoting]], I turned on filename
completion and command line editing in [[my unusual shell
../sysadmin/NonstandardShellAdvantage]]. Previously I had two or three
reasons for not doing this: it wasn't efficient on old machines,
I thought it was impure, and it clashed badly with [[_9term_, one
of my terminal emulators ../sysadmin/OnTerminalEmulators]].  Well,
old machines are long gone, [[a Linux kernel change broke _9term_
../linux/PtyChangeMaybeBug]], and using bash (by default) on some
systems around here had slowly sold me on the real and seductive
convenience of filename completion. I found myself missing it in my
regular shell then realized that now that I'm not using _9term_ there
was no reason not to build a version with GNU Readline support.

So far I rather like it and actually think that I should have done
this some years ago. (This is often how changes in my environment
go.)