This describes a lot of the tools I use in my dotfiles

This is an ever evolving list of tools and scripts I use and recommend, or combinations of tools I use to optimize my workflow.

Most of these are command line based, I wrap a lot of them in scripts here and in my pura-utils scripts repo

For other stuff I might be using, see my github stars

• Shells
  • zsh - for the fish-like highlighting and auto completion. Manually configuring everything makes this much faster than the monstrous oh-my-zsh
  • bash/dash - for shell scripting. My zsh setup is also much more dependent on external plugins, so I don’t use that on servers, I just stick to bash there. My bootstrap script sets up new bash servers for me nicely, see this post for more info
• Terminal
  • wezterm, which I’ve customized some:
    • a special cat alias which lets me cat images and directories, while in the terminal

OS-stuff

• Arch
  • Window Manager: sway
  • rofi for launching applications and switching windows
  • dunst for notifications, pretty normal configuration
  • autotiling for automatic tiling
  • gammastep to adjust color temperature
• Mac
  • I use skhd as a hotkey daemon. My dotfiles are cross-platform, lots of scripts in cross-platform that handle switching on the OS to call out to platform-specific behavior (sending notifications, clipboard management, asking for user input)
• Android (using termux)

Browsers

• qutebrowser as my main browser
  • uses its built-in ad blocking and python-adblock to block ads. not perfect but ok given the other positive trade-offs qutebrowser offers me
  • userscript manager/script which installs:
    • youtube tweaks for blocking ads, sponsorblock etc.
• floorp (a firefox-fork) for when I want to watch youtube/activities, do webscraping (for the nicer devtools/inspector) on a different profile
  • vimium-ff. Learning vimium has virtually killed the mouse for me. Especially the f binding, which highlights all clickable items and lets me click something with a keybind.
  • RES, to make reddit manageable, though I don’t go to reddit much these days
  • Violentmonkey so I can add bits of JS to sites I want to fix
  • Sponsorblock to skip ads in youtube videos
  • uBlock Origin to block ads
• tor for even more privacy/if I want to delete history after I close a session
• I use lynx to do quick duckduckgo searches without leaving the terminal/display some HTML nicely in the terminal (e.g. in rread)

General Workflow/Tools

• Editor: nvim using nvim-cmp for completion, configured here, mostly in lua
• Email neomutt for email, using mutt-wizard as a configuration layer to set it up
• RSS: newsraft for youtube/news/blogs. I have a script to grab a youtube users RSS feed, since youtube doesn’t list that publicly. linkhandler lets me open youtube videos from newsboat using mpvf instead of visiting youtube in the browser
• Backups:
  • SyncThing to Sync important directories across all my computers, and to my NAS
  • restic to a local drive, to have separate, offline, snapshots, using a small script to help manage all of that
• Todo list: todotxt for todos, with a rofi interface as GUI, and TUI for adding todos. The TUI I wrote forces lets me enter a deadline using plain english and converts it to a datetime, so is nice for quick reminders. todotxt-more has some great addons as well
• Calendar: calcurse as a calendar, with my calcurse-load hooks to add Google Calendar and todo.txt to calcurse automatically
• File Manager: a heavily customized ranger . See rifle.conf (file handler) and scope.sh (previewer)
• Task Scheduler: bash script (bgproc) with an infinite loop which runs in the background instead of cron (uses my evry tool to schedule tasks)

Media

• mpv to listen/watch media in general, integrated with my file manager (ranger)/playlist manager and just through a basic list-music/play-music script from the terminal
• Music:
  • beets to organize/tag my music; config file
  • my bash terminal playlist manager using fzf/mpv to store playlists for local music in local text files
• Images/Video:
  • For basic image cropping, I use pinta, for tiny bits of markup/highlighting I might use flameshot or gimp.
  • For general image manipulation tasks I create lots of small imagemagick scripts to do random resizes/converts. I have a larger script to convert videos to gifs, and use gifsicle for manipulating gifs
  • Lots of small ffmpeg scripts to convert between video formats.
  • For trimming video, I use an encode_webm keybinding in mpv

Android Apps

• termux - terminal
• F-droid to download applications not on the play store
• Pano-Scobbler to scrobble to last.fm/listenbrainz
• gpslogger to save my location
• syncthing to sync music/data from my computer to my phone
• activity watch - app usage tracker
• keepass2android to use my password database on my phone (synced using syncthing)
• sms backup & restore to save my call logs/sms messages

CLI tools I use all the time

Mine:

• FileHosting: To host files publicly quickly, I just sync it up to my server and serve it with nginx, using my remsync script. croc is nice, but that assumes the other person has terminal literacy
• password generator
• url shortener with this script to create new public URLs

Others:

• abook as an addressbook, because of its nice integration with neomutt
• datamash to perform basic statistics on text files/STDIN
• dragon, to be able to dragon and drop items from/to the terminal. Have my dragon-sink script, which accepts and cp/mv’s files from applications, and bindings in ranger to drag files into my browser. Also use draglastpic very often, which lets me drag the latest screenshot to some application
• dust; a fancy du clone
• entr for lots of small build scripts
• eza aliased to ls
• fd; a fancy find clone
• fzf everywhere, to fuzzy match in shell pipelines
• glow to render markdown in the terminal
• hyperfine to do benchmarks
• pandoc to convert formats (lots of markdown -> html)
• pygmentize to convert text to HTML - text2html
• jq to process json streams
• oh-my-stars (my fork) to search github stars offline
• vipe, to quickly edit my clipboard in a vim buffer
• yt-dlp to download video/audio from tons of places. yt-dlp is a youtube-dl fork which downloads faster and has more features
• yadm to manage my dotfiles
• my cat is aliased to bat, a fancy cat clone which highlights text based on extension/mimetype

Other CLI Tools I use less often

• boxes to print fancy boxes in the terminal
• chafa to print gifs in terminal
• codepsell to correct common misspellings in code files
• delta, for nicer git diffs in the terminal
• dex to open .desktop files
• figlet to print large letters
• gron when I can’t be bothered to use jq
• ix to create pastebin links from the command line
• jpegtran to compress JPEG files
• lorem to create a bunch of lorem-ipsum
• moby as a thesaurus
• ncdu to preview disk space interactively
• optipng to compress PNG files
• pastel to generate/pick color schemes/hex codes from the terminal
• pup to parse HTML on the command line
• qr (qrencode), to create QR images from command line
• qrc to create QR codes in the terminal
• readability; cli tool for Mozilla’s readability library, for parsing contents out of HTML
• shellcheck to check shell scripts for syntax errors
• speedtest-cli to test internet bandwidth
• sqleton to visualize sqlite databases
• termdown to countdown in the terminal
• toilet is another implementation of figlet, gives fancy colors in the terminal
• udiskie, to mount drives/USBs
• up - to interactively explore/pipe text data. Especially useful when doing data wrangling, like when using tools like jq/grep/cut to extract some information from a data source

Other GUI Applications I use less often

• nsxiv as an image viewer for more complicated/macro-like tasks
• simplescreenrecorder to do simple screen recordings; I use this to make demonstration gifs
• sqlitebrowser to explore sqlite databases