Alongside the gnu coreutils, these following programs are what I use near daily!
tl;dr: I like text
Arch Linux: I fell for the meme, but wouldn’t voluntarily use anything else in it’s place (though gentoo has tempted me as the next step to obtaining wizard status).
Librewolf: Privacy oriented Firefox fork. I have a few plugins:
Terminus: Not a program, I but felt it deserved it’s own shoutout as my favorite font. Now that I’ve seen the pixel-perfect accuracy of bitmapped fonts, anything anti-aliased just looks fuzzy.
neovim: I keep mine close to stock. I use a few plugins, but I try to keep them to a minimum:
I used to have a lot of autocomplete and language servers set up, but after reading a post about going without those tools and to RTFM in their place, decided to stop using them.
dwm: Dynamic tiling window manager! Patch-wise, I’ve modified the code so that when clients are moved between monitors, the client’s tagmask stays the same rather than matching the new monitor’s active tagmask. I also changed the way window rules work, so that only the first matching rule gets applied.
I used i3 previously but found it (and other manual tiling window managers) to be far too slow and unpredictable. I messed with Hyprland for a few months as it had a dwm-like stack layout, but I have ultimately returned to and stuck with dwm for the window tagging system.
st: Lightweight terminal emulator. I applied a series of scrollback patches.
dmenu: if you’re just using dmenu (or any clone) as a launcher, you’re missing out on a lot of potential. I have several scripts I’ve set up to prompt me with dmenu, a few examples:
I mostly use plaintext files when I can, but for a few data-intensive tasks I prefer dedicated programs (which interface with plaintext files anyways):
ledger: see my post
timewarrior: Time tracking software. I like to record and visualize time spent being productive. I assume gaps between intervals are either sleep, gaming, or consooming.
dwmblocks: I like to write custom modules to be displayed in dwm’s status bar, I don’t display much, just the time (RFC3339), the sum of recorded timewarrior interval durations (switches to show current duration and tags for open intervals), and a module that displays the sum of my liabilities I record in my ledger.
pass: my choice password manager, passwords are edited in plaintext, and then encrypted by a GPG key and saved.
Previously used KeepasXC, and before that, Bitwarden. I moved from Bitwarden to KeepassXC to keep my data local. Not that I don’t trust Bitwarden, I just prefer the independence. Could’ve used Vaultwarden for a similar effect. I moved from KeePassXC to pass for simplicity and so I could better integrate my password manager with my environment using dmenu and dunst.
mpv: highly configurable media player. I like adding osc=no to my config
file and exclusively using keybinds to control playback. I also installed and
configured mpvacious to streamline
sentence mining.
mpd, mpc, and ncmpcpp: mean audio player trio. I like that I don’t have to keep a program in the foreground that can distract me.
nsxiv: simple image viewer
zathura: simple pdf, epub, and cbx reader that uses vim motions.
typst: I’ve found wysiwyg software to be finicky in more complicated documents.
newsboat: RSS aggregator, I use it to follow YouTube, podcasts, and a few other blogs without falling prey to algorithmically generated recommendations and other distractions. (yt-dlp pairs well with this)
dunst: notification daemon, I primarily use it to show non-clipboard information from pass, like a site’s username and sometimes totp token. Also shows mpd’s status when controlling playback of the current playlist.
nnn: file browser for when the coreutils feel too slow. I heavily use the renaming feature as I can setup vim macros to bulk rename an entire directory. (primarily when renaming subtitle files to match their video counterpart)
man, tealdear, and wikiman: my troubleshooting trio. I like to try these before searching the relevant forum.
openscad: sometimes I’ll use FreeCAD if I decide the part I’m designing is more complicated than I’m interested in scripting.
PrusaSlicer
steam: gamer
vesktop: gotta talk to my friends