Software

This page lists software I use or have used. This page is a placeholder for now.

• tmux
• Firefox for the vast majority of daily browsing; I also use Google Chrome for Facebook and Gmail, and occasionally for some other JavaScript-heavy sites that I don’t want to view with Firefox. For most JavaScript-heavy web apps, often the easiest way to use them is to run them under an incognito Chrome window, rather than manually enabling a bunch of domains on NoScript or uMatrix.
• Vim with various plugins for most text editing.
• Git
• ELinks, Links, or Lynx for lightweight browsing depending on what I want. ELinks has tabbed browsing which I find easy to use, but Links can show images with the -g flag. Lynx seems to do correct checking for SSL certificates and additionally has -localhost -dump that is suitable for producing plain text dumps of webpages.
• Exuberant Ctags
• Music On Console
• Newsbeuter
• Ubuntu on laptop and Ubuntu and Debian on server
• MATE as a desktop environment
• KeePassX
• Bash for my shell
• Pandoc
• mutt for sending mail sometimes
• I use a modified version of Solarized Light as a colorscheme in my terminal. By default, Solarized has various shades of gray in its 16-color palette, which makes some console programs difficult to use; I therefore replace those colors with the equivalents from Tango. You can see the resulting values.
• IPython (now called Jupyter Qt console)
• htop
• rxvt-unicode a.k.a. urxvt No strong preference for the most part, except that I dislike it when the terminal emulator intercepts Alt key mappings, like Alt-f.
• Virtualbox
• PDF.js or MuPDF for most PDF files. For short PDFs, PDF.js suffices, but for longer PDFs I usually store a persistent copy and read them on MuPDF. This is partly because PDF.js has a bug where if I open a long PDF, then go do stuff in other tabs, then return to the PDF and scroll down, later pages just show a spinning wheel without actually loading. As for MuPDF, I like the simple aesthetic and speed, but I don’t care for the rectangular selection (which can only copy to the primary selection and not the clipboard?) and wish there was a tabbed interface and a way to show partial pages when scrolling down.
• Still looking for a good epub reader. I currently use FBReader but find the scrolling mechanism annoying.
• youtube-dl
• GNU userland, mainly because that’s what comes with Debian and Ubuntu and is what I’m most used to. I also install moreutils for sponge.
• rsync
• LibreOffice Calc for converting between CSV and XLS. I know almost nothing about it, but it seems to do what I want.
• I often use less (e.g. instead of tail -f I use less +F)
• fzf, mostly for recalling commands in bash with CTRL-R.
• Emacs org mode

Programs in trial mode:

• ag
• mpsyt
• arbtt
• cmark-gfm for Markdown processing; I’ve now used it for at least one blog post, and it is now used on GitHub. If more extensions are written for CommonMark (math, tables, metadata headers), and if the standard is adopted more widely, it probably makes sense to stop using Pandoc’s Markdown.

See also

• Colophon
• Account names, for SaaS

External links

• “Choosing Software” by gwern