Haiku 2023–354

the green cursor leaves

letters and words behind it

at the speed of thought

— —

When I sit down to journal and haiku in the morning, my writing instrument of choice is nano — a text-editing software first created in 1999. It ain’t the least bit fancy. I have to change the settings every time I open it to keep all the words on the same page. All the commands are executed using control keys with absolutely no support for a mouse. I used it for years before I learned that it had a rudimentary spell check. You can have the font, font size, and color of the words be any color you want as long as it’s the default setting for the terminal running it.

I chose green because green is old school, just like me.

I choose to use this program for a several reasons. First, it’s simple — just me and my words. Second, it works well with the script I use every morning. As soon as I close my email program — alpine, also text-based — the script determines what day of the year it is and opens a file name based on that number. If I already had a haiku written for the day, it brings it up on the page for my comments. If I don’t have one written (like today), it shows a blank screen ready for filling. When I finish for the day, I close the program and the file gets saved to a Personal Knowledge Management system (Obsidian, if you must know) where I keep almost everything I write or need to remember.

Today’s haiku is an homage to the relationship that I have with my text editor. The green cursor sometimes flies across the page leaving letters and words in its wake (this was the original path I was going down for this haiku, but I just couldn’t get it wrangled). Other times — like today — it just sits there patiently waiting for me to put a thought, any thought, on the page.

Fortunately for both of us, the cursor started moving eventually and brought you today’s offering.