Years ago I bumped into Sublime Text, which introduced me to multi cursors. I ended up becoming quite good at using regex for search, then pressing Alt+Enter to select all the matches. That satisfied my multi-selection needs, and although I tried getting into Vim later, I felt that the effort was too much and my setup already made me quite fast at editing code in multiple places.

Reading your comment earlier, while trying to make dinner now, made me realize that the reason I hate the layout of my house might be the same reason I never got into Vim...

To get to the kitchen, I have to walk through the dining room, where all the plates, bowls, glasses are. But I can’t grab what I need yet, because I haven’t seen the food. I first need to get to the kitchen, look at what’s there, and decide what I’m going to make... Only then do I know which tools I need.

My house verb first, but my brain works noun first.

> Ocham's razor(...) is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements.

> Popularly, the principle is sometimes paraphrased as "of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

What would that mean in this context?

Having said that, I just subscribed to ChatGPT yesterday, as I've become impatient with Claude for a text-dense project I'm working on.

It's named "yours" at the time of payment, but actually only a license to use under certain conditions.

ChatGPT is very long-winded, sometimes producing multiple bullet point lists for a simple answer. Claude is full of mannerisms: 'not merely x, but y', 'Here's where it gets interesting', 'the real question is', etc.

Im not anti-social, but I'm an introvert with some very extrovert friends. I find interesting that we, introverts, "get" extroverts; I have no problem understanding people who like begin around other people all day long, I'm just not that guy.

But extroverts don't get introverts at all! A sentence like "yeah, I enjoy being alone by myself" feels like alien talk to them.

The approach that finally worked for me (and one I still use today, years later) I learned from a book by Adrian Wells called Metacognitive Therapy. It's not self-help, actually; it's a clinical manual for therapists, but I read it anyway. The idea, in my own words, is not to engage with the thought but simply to recognize it, almost like greeting it and saying goodbye in the same breath. A thought comes, and you say, "Hmm, okay, I just thought that. That was a thought. That's fine." And you move on.

Of course, the book goes much deeper than that, but this simple approach helped me enormously with rumination and anxiety around intrusive thoughts.