Use The Defaults

When I was 13-years old I competed in the Blockbuster video game championships. The start of the competition was to be the best in your hometown. I destroyed the local competition by beating both secret levels in Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Upon winning Blockbuster invited me to represent my city in the state finals.

The game we would be playing was NBA Jam. The competition would be a single- elimination head-to-head tournament.

Upon winning the hometown championship you received a free game. I chose NBA Jam to hone my virtual basketball skills before the state competition.

For those of you that don’t play video games, you can customize your controls. On a Sega Genesis system there are three buttons: A, B, and C. I didn’t like the default setup on NBA Jam which is as follows:

* A - Shoot
* B - Turbo
* C - Pass

I preferred the following:

* A - Turbo
* B - Pass
* C - Shoot

Before changing the defaults, I of course, read the rules for the state finals. It explained that changing the button configurations was optional. I read this as: it is optional for the player to change controls.

The state final was an all-day event. When I showed up to play my first game I explained to the man setting up the station that I needed to change the controls. He responded that it was an optional rule and the coordinators chose to use defaults.

“Optional in this case meant it was up to the tournament coordinators. The “coordinators crushed my chances of winning because I had not learned to use the “default controls.

Although I attempted to play the best I could, with controls I didn’t know, my opponent destroyed me.

Losing this way was demoralizing. I didn’t know how good I was because I couldn’t use my custom controls.

Since losing, I never change defaults.

From that moment forward, any game that I played, I would only use defaults. I completely ignore control configuration screens. I don’t even open them.

I recently changed from Bash shell to zsh. Upon making the transition I asked my colleagues which themes they use for oh-my-zsh. Sean sent me this screenshot:

I was immediately turned off because it didn’t look like a default shell. I already knew zsh, by default, didn’t look like this because I had already installed it and had it working. But, if I had seen this screen first, I would have not installed zsh.

Sean has all kinds of customizations. A status bar at the bottom, a left and right column, and even a quote. When moving to a remote system (through ssh) this type of configuration takes a while to setup. I don’t want to configure a new remote system to be effective. It takes too long.

I have some customization, such as git aliases, but Sean’s setup is ridiculous.

Anywhere I can, I choose vanilla. When presented with options, use the defaults.

P.S. For those curious, I decided on the “muse” theme. Here is what it looks like: