> Tangentially, I've been meaning to read the design of everyday things. Is it worth it?

It's a great read -- helped me change my perspective on how I interact with tools and interfaces in my day to day.

WRT this thread, I moved most of my ties into emacs, so I just need a platform that can lift me into my elisp playground. I suppose that might be an approach of complexity, embrace big meta tools that let me do what I like (I'm a nix/nixos user as well) -- my line of thinking is that I'll be happy with the right "big tools" that let me create what I want -- I think from a "ties to a machine" POV this actually simplifies things, since you have fewer targets/tools that enable tools by owning more of the environment