Programs and Equipment I Use

Software I Use

Priorities

I'm about getting things done quickly and having as little space between my thoughts and actions on the computer.

I like having vim-like bindings and prefer running programs in the terminal for simplicity's sake. That said, I'm very much against the cringey meme that things in the terminal are "cooler" or "nerdier" XD. Terminals are good for most tasks, but useless for others, for example, browsing the modern web (I admit this unfortunate fact with much consternation) or looking at maps.

Terminal
I use st (simple terminal) by suckless.org, which is one of the most minimal, yet easily customizable terminal emulators out there. I have my config read a pywal cached file which gives st its colors.
Window Manager/Desktop Environment
Primarily using bspwm. What I like is that its config file is just plain ol' Bash! No complaints with it. If you want to know why my computer looks the way it does, this is what to check out. Occassionally I get irrationally anxious about my memory footprint, so I switch to DWM (again, from the suckless.org folks) only to switch back in a few weeks.
Fonts
My monospace font is typically Inconsolata, my serif font in Linux Libertine and my sans font is Linux Biolinum. I have ttf-emojione for emojis as well and noto-fonts and noto-fonts-cjk to give me non-European scripts.
Status bar
polybar, but I eventually come to realize that it's mostly useless, so it stays hidden.
Text editing and programming
vim. Less of a text editor and more of a lifestyle. No, I'm not going to ever switch to emacs. I use the pywal plugin for colors.
Web browser
The web is bloat so they are all kinda terrible. I have tried, chrome, qutebrowser in the past. Right now I use Vivaldi with the add-on Vimium to get customizable vim-like keybindings.
File manager
nnn. Yes, I have used ranger.
Mail client
mutt. Technically neo-mutt. I keep all my mail offline with offlineIMAP, gpg keys to store passwords.
Messaging
tox is what I recommend, but since it does not have an iOS client just yet, Signal will do. If you want to know why, see the section below about "Proprietary software".
Music/audio player
mpd with ncmpcpp for a library.
Video player
mpv. Don't bother with any other video player.
Writing documents
I used to write documents in LaTeX and compile them into pdf documents. Recently I've been experimenting with groff/troff to much success and recommend it as a much more minimal and elegant typesetting system, scarcely lacking anything you might need, although lacking documentation, so it'll probably be a jungle at first.
PDF viewer
zathura. I used mupdf, which is good too.
Image Viewer
sxiv (from suckless). Handles images, animated gifs, has additional thumbnail and slideshow modes and allows you to run custom scripts and read/write to standard input/output. Okay. This is epic.
Image modification
gimp for big things, but imagemagick commands for most little modifications, filter changes, trims, etc.

Where can I find good software options?

The program of your dreams is probably listed below:

Hardware I Use

Laptop
The main laptop I use is a Thinkpad T420s, released in 2011. Old ThinkPads are designed for long term corporate use, and last forever and are made to be easy to repair and improve. They have many simple perks, like their uniquely tactile keyboards, their trackpoints and their ThinkLight (a more commonsense solution to lighting your keyboard at night). Newer ThinkPads are not as good, lacking the classical keyboards and generally being more Mac-like (unrepairable, breakable, and generally bad for an enormous price).
Hard drives
SSDs are the only thing I recommend using a good bit of money on in your computer build. They make your computer hugely snappier and apparently use less power.

What I don't use

Proprietary software
I'm not going to endorse proprietary services that have gone out of their way to spy on or politically suppress their users, just as Facebook, or Discord. One of the many potential take-aways you should get from me is that the use of libre/free software, by its nature, is more constructive and extensible—that's the point. There are philosophical reasons for this you'll run across in time, but for now, suffice it to say I will not endose the usage of proprietary software.

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