The Smith & The Forge
Who is Ishe Chinyoka? A look at the philosophy behind The Textsmith.
The Textsmith, is perhaps the premier portal on working with plain text on the Internet today. It is run and maintained by Ishe Chinyoka, the Textsmith who believes in text as the ultimate tool that captures human mind and channels its effort to productivity and furtherance of civilization.)
To many, the computer is a mystery box of icons and menus. To me, it is a forge. I believe that text is the most resilient, accessible, and powerful medium we have. Whether I am preparing presentations for conferences, writing research papers or configuring a mail server in the terminal, my goal is the same: Digital Sovereignty.
My Tools
- The Hammer: A good text editor, often Vim (and occasionally a refined stream editing with sed and awk).
- The Steel: Plaintext (Markdown, Typst, AsciiDoc).
- The Equalizer: The Linux Terminal with the Orca Screen-reader in the desktop environment, or Espeakup and Fenrir in the virtual console.
I don’t just use technology; I strike it until it takes the shape I need.
About this blog
This blog is an expression of my interest in text-processing and what it can do to enhance and promote productivity.
It was set up as a labour of love and not to score high in search engine rankings. As a result, this is more of a portal for terminal enthusiasts who seek to exchange ideas on how to achieve certain things in the terminal.
Because of that, I post when I have something to say and when I have the time. Nevertheless, I understand that it has to be relevant to what it was set up for. For that reason, I regularly research on new markup languages, alternative ways to do certain things with plain text and so on.
Thank you for visiting this site, I hope you are going to find what you had been looking for.