Midnight Pub

Favorite Interweb Tools

~solanaceae

What are some of you guys' favorite tools for general computer use?

F.lux is great for me, along with ventoy for my USB drives.


zampano

I don't use a third-party night light thing anymore, since everything I use where I want it (macOS, ipadOS, and Plasma) all have it built in.

Much of my hobby stuff involves text, for which I use either micro or iA Writer, depending on the task. For typesetting, I've been playing with typst, which seeks to offer a replacement for TeX. I really like it overall, even if I wish their markup style were markdown rather than asciiDoc. It has *much* less overhead than TeX at this point, and allows in-document scripting (as well as external packages).

Obsidian is my go-to for note-taking/organization, although LogSeq is good too.

For coding, I generally use VS Code with the telemetry turned off. (Shout out to Sarah Drasner's night owl theme for Code.)

I'm in the process of setting up a backup/file sync setup again. For a time I self-hosted a Nextcloud instance, but its unreliability became too much of a burden. (Nextcloud's, that is, not my server host, which was great.) My tentative plan is to go with a combination of rclone and rsync.net, although I need to make sure I understand how to have rclone do automatic syncing rather than having to run it every time.

yt-dlp for grabbing YouTube videos that I find useful and know I'll go back to (typically how-tos/tutorials, but sometimes good, long informative stuff too).

Discord is my primary social messenger thing; not exactly by choice, but because that's what all the communities I'm currently a part of use. But I'm always looking for good subcultures!

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solanaceae

i just started using obsidian, it's really something else. so useful to have everything in one place and mapped to each other

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owleyarc

If you're looking for backup options, I *highly* recommend restic, with the backup task run by a simple cron job.

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zampano

Great, thanks for the suggestion! Will definitely check it out.

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tracker

I run Guix System as my OS and use EXWM as my window manager, so I essentially boot into Emacs, running on top of a package manager (guix) and service manager (shepherd), both of which are written in Guile Scheme. I write Clojure/Clojurescript professionally during the week and tweak my Emacs Lisp and Scheme system configurations outside of work. Since my desktop environment is Emacs

Since my desktop environment is Emacs, I do most everything using Emacs commands and text user interfaces (TUIs). Each of my F# keys is bound to a different Emacs command, so I can quickly jump to my most commonly used tools with a single key press. Here are my current F# bindings:

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aftergibson

I love ventoy! Copying and pasting a bunch of ISOs onto a single USB drive is just such a better experience than flashing each time.

Probably Emacs. But it's more an OS than anything org-mode, elpher, elfeed etc.

Hilariously, if I'm editing code I use VSCode.....

Here's my most used cli tools from my shell history.

1 664 17.3413% ls

2 580 15.1476% git

3 469 12.2486% cd

4 250 6.52912% make

5 152 3.9697% vim

6 110 2.87281% cat

7 90 2.35048% aws

8 82 2.14155% ag

9 75 1.95874% python

10 73 1.9065% source

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whiskeyding

Ranger or LF. For some reason, I despise graphical drag-and-drop filesystem interfaces. I should really learn to use Midnight Commander, as the DOS-like presentation is tremendously sexy to this old nerd :)

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bidgehop

I prefer GNOME's built in Night Light and Balena Etcher for flashing USB drivers

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