[T-976] Of course I went down a yabai & automator rabbit hole

Dear Rine,

I pocketed another five sentences before going to sleep.

Before that I watched that Japanese Godzilla movie from a few years ago.

I had company so I had the English subs on. Once those subs are there, it’s impossible not to look at them. Even when I’m using the Migaku tool, if I leave the blurred secondary subtitles in English, my brain can still discern the text – it’s not blurred enough.

One day, less than 976 days from now… my brain will switch over and find clear Japanese letters to be more legible than blurry English letters.

But of course, that day will be delayed if I continue with my dysfunctional behaviors. Today’s time sink was something I warned about in a post from a few days ago. I wanted to have it so that a single button click launches all my active immersion tools.

I was able to patch up an Automator (that’s the default Mac OS utility) applet to do just that fairly easily. It’s a simple drag & drop excercise, you just create a sequence of operations.

But then I wasn’t happy because the applet piled all the windows on a single display…

So I had to figure out how to automate that and have the windows spread neatly across my three monitors (laptop + two externals).

And since Automator wasn’t built to handle that… it led me to playing with the yabai config file…

I did manage to set everything so that each window opens on its designated display…

But only, like, 50% of the time.

For example, this line in my .yabairc is supposed to make Anki always launch on the display on my left:

yabai -m rule --add app="^Anki$" display=^2

But for some reason, half of the time it just ignores the instruction. I haven’t been able to figure out the cause. And I did try, very hard :(

But I am closing this issue. Moving the window manually half of the time will need to be good enough :)

Let me do some back-of-the-napkin ROI calculation. I sunk around three hours fiddling with this today. Let’s say that each time I want to fish sentences, it takes me three minutes to launch all the apps and tools (might seem as too much, but let’s account for my procrastination, too).

180 minutes divided by three is sixty.

That means that I need to click my button 60 times before it pays itself off.

That’s two months, if I continue doing one immersion sesh a day.

Remind me to celebrate late in June.

What I planned/did today

Obstacles