My Used Page, Part 3

published: October 31, 2025 estimate: 4 min read view-cnt: 5 views

Finally, the last part of the series. Let’s do it quickly and cleanly.
P.S. I assume readers have already read pt1 or pt2 to some degree, thus I’ll skip the detailed format used in previous posts

New Favorite

Hardware

Acer Swift Edge 14: fantastic hardware compared to my MacBook Pro 2018
- the price and the weight are almost half; the RAM, storage and battery life are doubled
- CPU performance is similar, though the current one claims to have reached 48 TOPS (I highly doubt I’ll leverage it)
- in short, the stats look good
- the three major drawbacks:
1. keyboard is not as slick as the MacBook
2. the bottom bezel of the screen is way larger than the top of the screen (I got used to it on the second day)
3. two keys are useless on Linux (one for Acer utility, one for Windows Copilot)
- overall, 4 out of 5 IMHO 👌

AI Tools

Claude Code: the first AI CLI tool I’ve used
- my coding needs are minimal for now, so using Claude Code alongside vanilla LazyVim (without any AI agents) is enough
- there are plenty of built-in commands and features I haven’t tried yet—will definitely give them a shot when needed

Web Front-end

HTMX: a lightweight front-end tool to communicate with the server and update page content via HTML attributes
- I heard that the creator of HTMX is a seasoned troll, he posts funny memes on X-twitter which makes the tool somehow more attractive 🤣🤣
Alpine: another lightweight front-end tool to add reactive behavior directly in HTML markup
- this tool originated from the Livewire ecosystem
- since it focuses only on the interactivity part of the front-end, you can use it along with HTMX and TailwindCSS
- to achieve the ultimate lightweightness for your front-end stack (using very little JS and CSS)
- however, this combo will make your HTML markup look messy

IDE & Editor

NeoVim: I use the LazyVim distro to bootstrap the tedious configuration
- haven’t done any heavy-duty configuration yet—I only adjust a few keybindings to fit my workflow
- I found it difficult to configure LSP and Treesitter properly
- though, it is probably just a skill issue

Browser

Lynx: I heard about this tool from a podcast. The first impression was amazing.
- I never thought of browsing the web inside a terminal using only 4 arrow keys
- the browser doesn’t support any JS and CSS at all
- all these constraints really help me reconsider what the essence of browsing the web is
- however, I must say limitations are a double-edged sword—they force you to be creative while stripping away all the convenience of modern browsers
- one thing I encountered was the endless redirection loop
- little did I know that modern browsers resolve these loops gracefully
- not the case for Lynx—all DNS records and redirect routes must be declared properly

Language

Nushell: this shell language handles and displays data gracefully, as if you had pandas built into Python
- however, I felt that it’s way too early for me to pick up this language
- the reason is that I mostly view my data in an editor, the raw format is good enough for me
Perl: one of my specialties is regular expressions, so Perl naturally came to mind
- I’ve read the llama book—I have no complaints about all the sigil or punctuation stuff
- however, the syntax for de-referencing objects is still not concise enough for me, especially compared to JS/C# which handle it under the hood
Raku: I used an LLM to convert scripts between bash, perl, and raku
- coming from my JS/C# background, I knew exactly which pain points Perl had, and it turns out Raku solves all of them
- however, it is still a long road to learn this language and reach the experience level I have in JS and C#.

Operating System

Omarchy: another opinionated distro to bootstrap everything
- the most difficult part is finding the correct file to configure, the correct component (keyword) you’re trying to configure, and the correct documentation to reference
- once I passed these barriers, things went a lot more smoothly
- to name a few keywords: arch, omarchy, AUX, Hyprland, Waybar, fcitx5

Closing Thoughts

That’s it—hardware that doesn’t cost a kidney, AI that actually fits into a minimal setup, front-end tools that skip the 500MB node_modules, a browser that breaks if your DNS sneezes, and Raku’s syntax design that makes other languages look playing it safe.

No grand themes here. Just a random collection of stuff I’ve tried. Some stuck, some didn’t, all taught me something (even if it’s just “don’t do that again”).

If you’re curious about the previous chaos, check out Part 1 and Part 2.