[Geir Isene] A desktop made for one

I've been interested in the concept of "soloware" since reading Abram's description of Sahil's worldview. i.e. in the age of vibecoding, it's achievable to build software and tools that match your specific needs.Recently a friend (h/t/ Rana) linked this post about a guy who's built basically an entire stack for himself, which seemed neat. A desktop made for one For the first time in twenty-five years I’m sitting in front of a computer where almost every program I touch was designed by me. One tool at a time, the off-the-shelf option got swapped out for something a little closer to how my hands wanted to work. (I wrote about the start of this a couple of weeks ago — that post laid out the early swaps; this one is the view from the other side of the journey.)It’s been a crazy few weeks guiding Claude Code inbetween all the other stuff I’m doing in life. I direct CC, it works while I do other stuff. I get a second or few in between tasks, and I respond. Then off it goes adding features or hunting bugs.Two suites in a happy marriage: CHasm, the bedrock — pure x86_64 assembly, no libc, the layer that paints pixels and reads keys. Fe₂O₃, the application layer in Rust, sitting on a small shared TUI library called crust.The CHasm layer (assembly)RoleWasNowWindow manageri3-wmtileStatus bar / trayi3bar + conkystrip + asmitesScreen lockeri3lockboltTerminal emulatorkittyglassLogin shellzsh → rshbareFile viewerlessshowThe Fe₂O₃ layer (Rust on crust)RoleWasNowText editorVIMscribeFile managerranger → RTFMpointerEmail / RSS / chatmutt + newsbeuter + various web loginskastrupCalendarsGoogle + MS webtockAstronomy panelastropanelastroMovies / seriesIMDB-terminalwatchitWhat’s left? WeeChat for IRC and other chats. Firefox — the only GUI program I still use regularly. That’s it. Everything else is mine.The vim lineLet me get a bit sentimental about vim, because vim was the one I thought I’d never replace.I started using it in 2001. For twenty-five years, every email I wrote went through