Fellow lobsters, I’m curious what the “software” side of your daily setup looks like.
This includes operating system(s) you’re using, desktop environments (if any), editors, and any other stuff you’d like to mention.
Fellow lobsters, I’m curious what the “software” side of your daily setup looks like.
This includes operating system(s) you’re using, desktop environments (if any), editors, and any other stuff you’d like to mention.
rg.elAre you using Void with musl or glibc? I heard that Emacs support under musl isn’t that great, so if you’re using that, could you comment on it?
The GLibC edition. It Just Werks.™
hi rocky rock
lookin good
Hey rocx, I second your list. But what advantage do you see on
fishoverzsh? from my perspective, zsh has better features also who can forgetOh-my-zshproject.🤷♂️
Made the decision with a dartboard. Mainly using a stock Fish setup. The ability to
C-eto finish an autocompletion from history is nifty.Allow me to chime in. I have used bash, zsh+omz, and fish shells, so would love to share my experience. My most current shell (for over 2years now) is Fish, and I absolutely love it.
fish is lightweight. It is snappy. zsh tends to slow down when you have a lot of plugins enabled.
you may need to install the autocomplete plugin in zsh, but it is baked right into fish. The tab-completion in fish doesn’t just parse through your history and available packages to suggest commands. It also allows you to autocomplete switches for commands, along with a summary of what switch does what (uses the man pages of the command).
ls -brings uph, A, l, f, O, xas a list with the summaries. Useful when you need hints while executing pip/npm/docker commands or anything else.]ls /va/li/gi, auto-expands the arg tols /var/lib/git. Useful when you know where to find what, but dont want to type in a lot]configuring zsh to your taste takes time (if you dont have the dotfiles), and those dotfiles tend to get large pretty fast when you start copy pasting stuff into them. On the other hand, getting up and running with fish is a breeze. It also has a ‘browser mode’, where you can configure the prompt, theme, aliases and other features using a friendly web-interface.
syntax highlighting is native to fish, and is very fast. I have seen zsh slow down or take time to process what’s written, but fish highlights it almost instantly.
a lot of things in fish are configured using functions, which you can define and save separately. no need to have everything in one long file.
you can set and unset env variables temporarily or permanently, depending on your use-case.
zsh extends bash. fish is entirely different.
the scripting language in fish may not be entirely POSIX compliant (one tradeoff you have to make for speed), but the scripts are neater and cleaner. (think python vs C++). Neater organized code.
To summarize:
fishis definitely lighter, and faster thanzshorbash. It is different, but what you get is time-saved because tweaking and configuring fish as per your taste isn’t a hassle. The few packages you may ever require, can be fetched using the “oh-my-fish” framework.To give fish a spin, just do a pacman/brew install fish. Ubuntu requires you to add their ppa, which you can find from https://fishshell.com.
fish does by default what zsh requires you to configure. As the design document kind of bluntly puts it,
Behold! https://github.com/oh-my-fish/oh-my-fish
Audacious is so great. Simple and lightweight.
Looks nice and productive.
i will never be able to keep the same distro as long as you do rocx
Void looks interesting. What made you choose that distro?
Another happy void-user here. In my case, the package manager (xbps) and runit.
Kneejerk reaction to Ubuntu moseying on towards
systemdfor its init. Kind of silly, looking back. Why I stick with it now is because of its automated installer compared to Arch and its decent performance (<1min from cold boot to password entry to XFCE).Noteworthy mentions would be nvi/vis for small terminal edits, pandoc for document conversion (really nice tool, check it out), ffmpeg – the pandoc for audio and video, Quod Libet for music, radio and podcasts, mpv(+youtube-dl) for watching videos, GIMP which stands for “Green is my Pepper” and Syncthing to synchronise files with other devices.
How do you like vis? I’ve been meaning to try it out but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
It’s quite comfortable, not only because of the multiple cursors/sed-selection stuff, but because it’s really good with large files thanks to
mmap. But otherwise, it’s just like regular vi. Since I never really got used to vim, except for stuff likeya(,di{, I don’t miss much from that front. Haven’t really worked with it on larger projects. Configuring it can be hard, because the documentation isn’t that specific about it, but besides adding my own theme (makes it look more like nvi), I haven’t had to change anything really.If you’re using a Debian derivative, you can easily install it from the standard repositories, so it’s easy to try out.
Cool! I usually use vim like vi anyway, so it’s no big deal that it lacks vim-specific features. I should definitely try it out soon. It’s been on my radar for a while. Thanks for the info.
what’s wrong with acme? :-)
What do you use sam for? I tried it a few times, but I never really understood it’s strengths, besides being an ed with a visual mode.
Editing text, mostly. I just don’t like acme much. (Also, since I can’t edit the parent post: ‘at’ is a typo, should read ‘st’)
There exists a vim port for plan 9.
https://vmsplice.net/9vim.html
Vim on Plan 9? That’s no fun. :)
What hardware do you run 9front on?
Thinkpad X260, a NUC, and a cloud server from vultr. There are other systems that get netbooted at times, too. And a couple of older thinkpads that I don’t really use much any more.
I used to run 9front in a Vultr VPS. It’s so nice that they let you upload your own ISOs; I wish more hosts allowed that.
I can’t believe your’e the only one (so far) to mention cmus for music. It’s so lightweight and versatile. And you don’t have to use a mouse.
I’m on Slackware Linux, though I have so heavily customized it you will probably only recognize a handful of the programs:
I was a KDE user until about 2007 when I tried sloppy focus and actually really liked it… then just went to a more minimal window manager and switched from konqueror to firefox and from there just went nuts writing new stuff for myself.
I also have some qemu VMs and a Windows laptop for some purposes, but for the most part I use my custom terminal emulator on Windows too :)
What does your custom slack client do differently than the standard web interface or standard electron client?
I use wee-slack for slack.
The biggest thing is that it uses somewhere between 10% and 1% of the RAM that Slack’s own garbage desktop client does, while also having massively reduced interface latency.
Side benefits include a UI I find far preferable and which is easily customizable; logging; and generally having the ability to mitigate Slack’s detriments.
Teach me Master, how did you manage to get there, ’cause I tried hard and failed. Slack abandoned the IRC way and they claimed about weechat. I failed many times, and I got to think their claims were void…
https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack
I found it quite plug-and-play. Note your slack org does need to allow apps (or whitelist wee-slack in particular).
I’ve used matterircd a while ago. It’s not a 100% slack replacement, but it was better than running the slack client for a slack with 2 messages a day.
Which is what I did exactly, then I’m asked to an authorization to install this application on our organization in slack, but even the leverage of an admin didn’t allow me to get rid of the damn GUI client.
I’ll try again (and ask admin again)
It has fully custom filters and notification methods, also combining multiple workspaces into one place. Also uses < 2 MB of RAM at startup and virtually zero cpu, which is nice, but the main impetus I had writing it was to tame the notifications. (I don’t like the “desktop notifications” system at all, but also I want all messages in some channels, except bots, and nothing in others unless it mentions a couple keywords or if I replied recently and that just meant my own code.) Another nice benefit is I flattened the stupid threaded conversations nonsense to make them usable.
It basically more resembles an IRC interface.
OK, this is going to stand out from the rest of the crowd.
Extras @home
There was a lot of pain due to folks upgrading early to VS 2017, so I’m curious how this is working out for you.
LOL, we’re all just trying to get a decent terminal on WIndows. I initially tried Cygwin, but now I’m over on WSL.
We haven’t transitioned the compiler yet, so we still generate VS 2015 projects. Other than that the IDE is snappier, opens much faster and is generally nice.
Oh and BTW for Visual Studio user, I strongly recommend the Fast Find extension which has an excellent fuzzy finder that can deal with huge solutions. For around 15$, it is really worth the price.
How did you get OpenBSD on the edgerouter? I have an ER4.
It’s been a some years since I’ve done it, but I basically followed the OpenBSD/octeon guide which supported the EdgeRouter Lite at that moment.
Since the main drive is a USB flash, I remember setting noatime,softdep on the mount point in my fstab tab to minimize the amount of writes. I has being going strong since then, with the base install providing everything I would want for a router (even games ;)
Things I use and want to use
Things I use and don’t want to use
This is what my desktop looks like:
http://downloads.yorickpeterse.com/desktop.png
This is my NeoVim setup, which I run in full screen most of the time.:
http://downloads.yorickpeterse.com/nvim.png
that is a really neat font, love it! could you please tell me which one it is?
The font I use for NeoVim is Source Code Pro, the desktop font is Noto Sans Regular.
sweet! thanks a lot :)
What’s the color scheme you use for NeoVim? I have my font size a bit bigger with the color scheme I use now (different editor, but still), but it seems perfectly legible in your screenshot.
I use my own color scheme: https://gitlab.com/yorickpeterse/happy_hacking.vim (mirror: https://github.com/yorickpeterse/happy_hacking.vim).
Any particular reason for prefering that to nvim in a terminal?
neovim-qt has a significantly lower input latency compared to running NeoVim in a terminal. I no longer have the data sadly, but most terminals (including GPU ones like Kitty and Alacritty) had something like 2-3 times the input latency. The worst are libvte terminals, which for me had a latency of around 80-90 ms. neovim-qt in turned hovered somewhere between 10 and 20 ms.
Ah. I use a low latency terminal and DE, so I would probably not benefit much. xterm has 2ms latency (90%). https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/
Parabola Arch/Linux, LXDE, KeepassXC, Emacs, bash, python, IceCat and Tor browser are the main ones.
Work:
Personal:
If you do personal programming projects, do you use the iPad for that too? That certainly seems plausible with some of the good SSH apps and iSH, but I tried this summer and couldn’t get comfortable. My mentality as the Emacs and Unix user is to customize everything humanely possible, and that wasn’t going to happen on iOS.
I don’t do any personal programming projects anymore. I still own a MacBook Pro that I almost never use.
My setup is fairly “riced”, you can take a look at my dotfiles, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Other chat protocols are handled by bitlbee (including twitter). My work and home setups are mostly the same, but at work I use weechat and wee-slack since we use slack (ugh) and I have chromium around to deal with hangouts for work reasons.
After that just a smattering of the usual suspects like various interpreted languages languages (mostly perl), compilers, ssh, mpv, and other things that I touch less frequently.
fishtmux attachis very helpful for when I want to SSH in to my work machine from home and do work there.findand ripgrep in the terminal for finding stufftokeito count lines of code (very, very fast compared tocloc)take a look at https://github.com/sharkdp/fd instead of
find. it’s nicer (likeripgrep), with gitignore support, colors by default, etc…I’m quite content with Fastmail’s web interface. I don’t like to have my email client always open anyway, because it can break new out of flow. What’s making you want to switch from Geary btw?
Geary’s interface feels like it doesn’t update consistently. For example, I’ll see that I have 2 unread messages, but the actual view of my inbox won’t show that unless I manually switch from one mailbox folder to another (e.g. inbox -> drafts -> inbox). Doing some cursory searches shows that this may have been fixed earlier this year so I’ll have to see if I can get an update for my distro.
Additionally, I really wish Geary had a “read all” button. It was suggested about a year ago, but it’s still an open issue. Maybe it’s time for me to learn Vala and make that contribution.
I try to keep it simple and clean: nixos, i3, bash, vim, xterm, Firefox.
Pop_OS 19.04:
OS: Ubuntu
Desktop: i3
Shell: Bash
Editor: Sublime/Vim
IDE: VSCode
Browser: Chromium
Music/Video: VLC
At home I have a desktop with Arch Linux, i3, rofi, and xfce (I use the xfce bar and terminal). At work I use a laptop with Windows 10. It has visual studio on it (I used to use it daily, but nowadays I only use it sometimes for the excellent debugger). I login to a machine running Ubuntu 14.04 with xrdp. I often use chromium, gcc, python, bash, and vim.
An attempt at clustering things a bit.
I know I use these all the time. There might be more. I’m not even counting the web apps I have to use.
I loved cwm for a time. Until I was defeated by laziness and now just run vanilla/stock everything.
Web-based software I use daily:
I was previously unaware of keepassxc. Been needing a solution I like and this ticks my boxes. Thanks!
Graph Galaxy - a WYSIWYG editor for Graphviz.
Arch + sway + kitty + fish
neovim, firefox-nightly
Slackware (current), Emacs, AwesomeWM, xterm, Firefox (Developer), Nextcloud, Ruby, Typescript
Work communication is HipChat and Google Meet.
this is 90% of my tech usage
Fedora Silverblue, Gnome Terminal (although I’ll probably be switching to Tilix to make better use of bigger screens), Firefox, and vim.
I would like to go back to using acme, but it doesn’t work correctly in XWayland and I haven’t yet bothered to try to port devdraw to Wayland. I assume that’ll be a giant pain and not work correctly.
My dev environment is version controlled: https://github.com/bitemyapp/dotfiles
Well I try to avoid Electron based app as much as possible, but sadly popular tools are written in Electron only. i.e. Slack, VS Code, PostMan, Spotify, Standard Notes, etc etc
But here is my list of softwares which I use on daily basis:
On Desktop: Mac OS
On Terminal: I have some tool configured
vim-airline, fzfetcfzftool for fuzzy searching, also I have configured this one to triggere on Ctrl+R: https://github.com/junegunn/fzfagthe silver searcher, the fastest available grep alternative: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcherlsdinstead ofls: https://github.com/Peltoche/lsdrangerfor command line file managerasdfas single version manager for most programming language: https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdfmoshassshwrapper for maintaining ssh connection even if we change the networkautosshfor maintaining persistent tunnelsshuttleallows you to create a VPN connection from your machine to any remote server that you can connect to via ssh: https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttletldr: https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr.zshrcDesktop: Fedora, Gnome Shell, Firefox, Evolution, Gnome Terminal, gedit, Audacious
Laptop: Windows 10, Firefox, Outlook, PuTTY, OneNote, Visual Studio
On remote systems, I try to stay close to defaults for the OS (which could be anything) as possible; the exception is if the defaults are truly repugnant (like say, original Bourne shell). I actually can use vanilla vi just fine.
Ubuntu LTS (default desktop), Chrome, XTerm, Bash, Tmux, Vim, OpenSSH, GEdit, Flameshot, Slack, Zoom
I had a couple of issues with my setup recently, so this doesn’t reflect my fully normal workflow.
I’m on Lubuntu at the moment, using the GNU Guix package manager. I’m using Gnome, with pretty much everything disabled (plugin system, animations, etc). I downloaded the Lubuntu ISO using Transmission, monitored via transmission.el.
My browser is Luakit. I access Mastodon via the Pinafore web client. Frequent sites are https://wttr.in, amazon, my education portal, Wikipedia (I binge-read for fun), and my search engine of choice, https://lite.qwant.com/ .
I’m using Emacs, configured, but mostly using stock stuff. I am however using evil (and evil-collection), mu4e, magit, yasnippet, and projectile, organised with use-package. I don’t use a completion system like ivy. I also don’t use package.el, rather install my packages through guix. I run emacs in the terminal version, either through gnome terminal or more frequently in tty2 - I’ve set the colour scheme to solarized light. I take notes in org mode and play music via emms (ogg123 backend), which was organised with beets. I regularly make use of the RPN
M-x calcfor quick calculations and conversions.I manage my passwords with pass. Currently my shell is bash, although I mostly use eshell or emacs for that kind of stuff. I mostly use the default shell programs which are on my computer (grep, cat, and so on) rather than new versions written in rust or something because my computer can’t cope with compiling rust very well (last I checked anyway), and I prefer to be able to compile my stack if I choose to, even if I usually don’t.
For email, I use mailbox.org with a custom email address, mbsync and msmtp to send and receive it, mu to organise it, and mu4e as mentioned above to read it.
In terms of programming languages, I use Lua (or fennel), C, and Scheme (guile or chicken), depending on what I’m doing. I’m not a programmer by trade so don’t stick to a specific language, I like to play with multiple. Currently I’m messing with Racket and Ocaml the most.
Reasonably sure that’s everything. I’ve tried to keep it all kind of organised into categories. Thanks for the good question!
I use A LOT of tools, majority of which daily or every few days. I am mostly on Windows 10 today for all needs.
Those are almost always cross platform FOSS tools:
OS specific (I tend to avoid OS lock-in except when tools are epic):
Online services:
Browser plugins:
OS: Fedora (work), Ubuntu(home) Editor: Emacs (helm + many more!) Term: Konsole->alacritty + Fish, rg, fd, DE: Gnome (cinnamon wouldn’t play nice with sleeping on laptop lid closing), Workspace Grid (4x4 workspaces) Email: Thunderbird (ew)
I use debian stretch - haven’t had the reason to upgrade.
i3, i3lock, alacritty, tmux, bash, vim, mpv/youtube-dl, find, grep, git, curl, jq, weechat, top, firefox, newsbeuter, gpg, cal, node, xdotool & xkeybindings
I would like to not use firefox eventually. The web is too bloated. I should be able to view all websites reasonably in lynx. For everything else I should be using my own clients that talk to websites’ API.
I should eventually replace tmux with dvtm and dtach.
I should replace vim eventually with an editor written specifically for me.
I should use dash instead of bash or something simpler.
find -> fd
grep -> ripgrep
curl and jq will not be replaceable.
weechat is amazing in every which way. It’s truly a futuristic chat client.
top works just as good as htop when you know how to use it.
i3 & i3lock will never be replaced until we are all on wayland - then it’ll be sway or whatever it is.
alacritty is good, could be replaced with st, but not a big deal which terminal emulator I use, as long as it supports all of vim’s features.
mpv/youtube-dl is not replaceable either.
newsbeuter is great for rss feeds, something I’ve only recently discovered the power of.
gpg may be replaced eventually depending on the ecosystem.
cal -3 is a great little utility to quickly look at dates.
node is basically not replaceable; it’s a useful repl to quickly test bugs and js language features.
A distro that includes these by default would be extremely useful. My goal is to have a toolbox I totally understand and could modify if need be.
Actually a userland written completely in one language would be awesome. Maybe one day I’ll just write my own little language and implement all the above in a simple form.
jrnl.sh is awesome. It helped me organize my life.
Neovim, iTerm, Firefox, git
vim, python, google.
These are the three essentials. Everything else for me is replaceable. Even vim, sometimes. But without the other two, I’d be screwed.
No ones mentioned Appcode - my Swift IDE of choice.
[Comment removed by author]
Webapps have replaced my email and music programs
In a random order: FreeBSD 12, i3wm, Firefox, Signal Desktop, Cryptomator, Keepass, Telegram, Spotify, VS Code, Libreoffice, Krita, git, bash, Remmina, Nextcloud, my favorite terminal of the moment.
At Work:
At Home:
GNU Emacs, Slickrun, Xplorer2, Keepass, Firefox, Poppeeper, Switcheroo, Everything
OS: macOS Mojave
Email: Mozilla Thunderbird
Browser: Opera
Authenticator: Authy
Music: Spotify
Terminal: standard mac Terminal
Notes: TextEdit
Communication: Slack
Containerization: Docker (docker-compose)
IDE: Visual Studio Code
I recently got back into .NET work. I am a recovering Mac user (I see the platform as dying, and 3 keyboard replacements made me mad). I don’t like FAANG.
Windows 10, Visual Studio 2019, SQL Server Management Studio 2017. WSL, Git. Vim, Notepad++. GIMP. ProtonVPN. Firefox with Containers, Privacy Badger, uBlock, and LastPass. Thunderbird. Riot, Signal Desktop, Discord. Foobar2000. For music work, REAPER, Audacity, MuseScore.
Windows/Work:
Home:
Side projects on my personal server:
Linqpad is awesome. I haven’t played with UI generation - I mostly use it for queries and as a scratch pad for C#
OS: Ubuntu
Editor: vim w/ syntastic, fzf
Terminal: alacritty with tmux
DE: i3-gaps w/ polybar and d-menu
Browser: Google Chrome (personal and work instances) w/ vimium / ublock
Music: Spotify
Shell: Bash
Comms: Gmail / Hangouts / Docs / etc
Source control: Mercurial (internal) / Git (for OSS only)
I use both macOS and Arch Linux on a regular basis, with macOS being used mostly for work, arch for side-projects/open source. I spend the huge majority of my time in the terminal or the web browser and I’m not a gamer, I use very little other “apps”.
For mac:
Of course, git, Go and a number of other command-line tools/utilities/databases/programming languages.
Browsing: Firefox with UBlock Origin, UMatrix, and Privacy Badger Editor: Emacs Terminal Emulator: ITerm 2 with ZSH
That mix covers 80% of my daily work–I occasionally have to open Android Studio, or use Postman.
Work (office, heavily controlled):
Home:
Phone:
Probably pretty boring stuff for a developer who uses several languages and ecosystems
terminatorfor mouse-resizing, but any terminal is fineThe only thing I’m really finicky about is what apps are on what virtual screen, I wrote about it here: https://f5n.org/blog/2019/desktop-environments/ - this is just a habit and lets me context-switch very quickly without alt-tabbing 10 times.
I used to blog a list of “make windows bearable” tools: https://f5n.org/blog/2016/tools-windows-2016/
Home
Work (where it differs from home)
That’s it really
My primary dev machine runs a fairly close to vanilla Fedora Workstation. Clean and boring all the way. I’ve bounced around many distros and DEs but I keep coming back to the workspace-centric flow of GNOME. And I just plain like the look and feel.
Text editor, Document Reader, Firefox, VLC, and password manager get me through most of my daily needs.
Software I currently use weekdaily: arch linux (systemd, pacman) or void linux (runit, xbps), dwm, compton, bash, urxvt, vim, mpv, mutt, offlineimap, sxiv, sxhkd, dmenu, glances, weechat, syncthing, firefox (ublock origin, vimium), keepassxc, tmux, ssh, git, git annex, redshift, xbanish, xtrlock, mupdf, newsboat, bitlbee-libpurple (skype in weechat, please), magic wormhole (not-daily, but I want to mention it), standard unix commands. I currently favour the dina font.
Oh and “daily”, but only during the holiday season, I run xsnow.
My list of software I use daily is Karabiner, Alfred, VSCode, iTerm on mac amongst other tools. And Tweetbot, 2Do, Telegram, Overcast on iOS.
A little bit cluttered, trying to braindump
Work (MacBook Pro):
Mixed use (Personal, do work on it too) - Thinkpad X1 Carbon, 4th gen
/etc/portage/package.*/*)Personal Server
https://notes.neeasade.net/assets/img/desktops/full/2018-09-21.png
http://noriceno.life
os: nixos (thinking about CentOS 8 soon™, it’s been about 3 years)
editor: emacs
terminal: emacs
irc: emacs
browser: qutebrowser
wm: bspwm
panel: lemonbar
Mostly on a Mac for work, which is sad.
Home (OpenBSD, iPhone)
I use a lot of the usual suspects, but here are a few of the less popular things that I use a lot:
Me and Angelo Pesce both ended up with basically the exact same toolset and he described it in great detail here:
http://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2011/04/2011-tools-that-i-use.html
Firefox (NoScript, TreeStyleTab, Copy as Markdown/Copy Selection as Markdown), Vim/Neovim (with many plugins), Keybase (incl. for private git repos), 1Password, Marktext (after Zettlr, after Typora), Kdiff3 (esp. for the Ctrl-Y keyboard shortcut), Symphytum, Calibre, ripgrep, git, https://gingkoapp.com, Go (mostly at work), Nim (currently main lang for hobby projects/prototypes), Dead Cells (game, recently sees a lot of use…)
Ansible, icinga, vim, git, pass, terminator, screen, cinnamon, firefox, debian, claws, wireguard, openvpn, nginx, borg, irssi, dehydrated
borg? borgbackup or the google cluster manager?
On my personal machine I additionally use:
On my Work machine I additionally use:
(Edit: removed some stuff I don’t use daily.)
Job:
Not job:
OS X 10.{12,14}.6:
Looking at what I have running right now, it’s
Work
OS: Windows 10
Home
OS: macOS
In no particular order:
Ubuntu, Xfce4-session, Chromium, SoundCloud, Lobsters, YouTube, Geany, Vim, Xfce4-terminal, DuckDuckGo, Lua, Kazam (for screenshots)
I’m using mac.
Daily used apps:
As for ios:
I use and endorse the use of, a Macintosh, both as my work computer, and my personal one. I don’t use that much software these days:
Not daily, but critically, I also use:
… with the latter two keeping me on the Mac.
On my commute, I listen to podcasts on my iPhone with Overcast, and play games on my Switch (today, it’s “Untitled Goose Game”).