Frugal Freedom
April 1, 2026•322 words
Listed Post Test
For working with computers freedom and frugality will be our principles of choice.1 When choosing what software to work with our standards|- will be with freedom and frugality. We want programs that we can share, edit, and adapt. We hope to work in a way that does not waste resources: our earth's water and electricity, or our computers' screen area, or even our won cognitive load.
Being frugal means not to waste resources, neither our own nor those of others. This is one earth we all live with
Freedom and frugality may be the principles of choice1 for deciding what software to work with. Free software that conserves our resources are what we should work with. To ease people out of wasteful proprietary software and into freedom and frugality a graded approach is possible. Keeping within the limits of plain text as much as possible is another guiding principle. Text does not require the environmental resources, the water and electricity needed for cpu cycles, storage space required by binary files, from office software for example. Text allows us to conserve our time, our heritage, our attention spans.
Plain text files are needed for efficient backups and version control. While emacs with Lisp(Scheme and Racket) and org-mode provides thresholds for entry into programming (as a liberal art, including the history of programming, and math...) and all sorts of effective habits for working with computers, distraction-free writing with markdown and relativelsy simple backups and version control with fossil can serve better as first steps into freedom and frugality.
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"The only thing needed, then, is to find a principle of choice that will give shape to the world. And such a principle is found, not in the reality we know, but in the reality that will be — in short, the future. In order to reproduce properly what is, one must depict also what will be." Albert Camus: Create Dangerously ↩