T-shirt designs

Sometimes I come up with silly and/or crazy ideas for t-shirts. Some also work as designs on mugs, stickers, bags, and other things.

The current list of designs is on my shop on spreadshirt. Have a look and see what you might like!

Below I describe the background stories behind some of the designs.

The vim hjkl navigation keys

I’d originally seen a t-shirt on Peteris Krumins’ blog in an article about where the hjkl keys in vim come from. On that page Peteris had a limited-edition run of t-shirts sporting the outline of the original inspiration for vim’s hjkl navigations keys. I thought, “I’d like to have that t-shirt!”, but it had been long sold out by the time I spotted it. So I thought I’d make my own.

As with Peteris’ design, I used a photo of the original ADM-3A terminal keyboard and based my design on that.

To see one version of the result, click on this link or visit my spreadshirt shop.

Subsitute cars with bicycles

Ever thought that there are too many cars on the road? And that maybe there’s a more efficient mode of transport? Yup, me too. As an avid cyclist, one solution is obvious: substitute the cars with bikes! And as a geek, what better way to do that than by using the Perl substitution operator?

This design isn’t an original idea of mine, I once saw a friend wearing a t-shirt with a simpler version at a programming conference and wanted to have my own version with emojis for the car and the bike.

Also available as a sticker or coffee mug in the associated spreadshirt shop.

Replace cars with bicycles; Python edition

Not only do I spend a lot of my day programming in Perl, but also I do a lot of Python. So why not make a Python version of the s/car/bike/g Perl t-shirt? Of course, with Python one doesn’t say “substitute” but “replace”. It’s the same idea, hence the t-shirts are equivalent.

If you’re more the Python person and would rather that bikes replaced cars, this is likely the t-shirt for you.

Also available as a sticker or coffee mug in the associated spreadshirt shop.

Esc & Meta & Ctrl & Alt & Shift

As you might have guessed, this is an homage to Emacs, a text editor that I wrote two theses in and have many fond memories of. Although I’ve been a vim user for the last 20 years or so, Emacs (the version I remember, at least) still has a soft spot in my heart. Email, news, LaTeX, C, Fortran and Matlab, all in the one environment! I could even play Tetris in it! Ah, nostalgia!

This t-shirt design is based on the very popular meme based on the 90s TV show, Martin. I’ve seen many variants of it; there’s one for the Gang of Four (famous for their book about design patterns) one for a list of space agencies, or even one for the Dunning-Kruger and Gell-Mann amnesia effects. So why should Emacs miss out? Hence the idea for this t-shirt design.

Not only is this design available as a t-shirt or hoodie, but it’s also possible to have it on a mug, a tote bag, or even as a sticker. Have a look in the spreadshirt store for more options.