2021-07-20
If there's anything that open source programmers love to write about it's their own personal software choices. I've written previously on what software I use on Tildes and on my Alpine Linux on my phone use.
Anyway, here's my own personal software tools that I use regularly (lol) and some that I wasn't the creator of but have contributed to.
These are generally small little tools meant to run in the terminal or in the web browser as those are the two 'platforms' I usually am building for. My coding is generally fairly minimalist, not necessarily in terms of system resources (though that is often true as well) but more in terms of engineering complexity. Most of these are wrappers or 50 lines of code or less.
Essentially a wrapper around Mozilla's Readability web reader-mode and pandoc. This little program pulls down a given URL, cleans out any headers, footers and other cruft and then converts it to beautiful, minimal html, markdown and epub files.
A tiny fishscript program to keep a minimal log/diary on the computer. Very similar to the Tinylog movement on Gemini except that it's stored personally, not meant for a public audience. No tagging, time-recording or other metadata beyond the date is recorded by default. I usually run this near the end of the day and enjoy jumping back months at a time (or longer) to see what I was doing or thinking on a certain day.
Originally created to add a scratchpad functionality to my vimwiki personal wiki on my laptop but since it's javascript I pushed it to a hidden spot on my website so I can use it on my phone and tablet. So I've been using it as a personal (weird) sketching app, then saving or screenshotting. Output is sketchy indeed. For example this weekend on a ferry trip I sketched my fellow passengers on my phone while riding on the bumpy seas, which complemented the rocking waves. A good app for sketching in a checkout line, subway, ferry, airplane, or in Vim!
A short fishscript program to display the number of readers of my gemini capsule from the current day, past month, and of all time. Reports same for the Ctrl-C Club tilde server overall. Written about previously here:
Writing A Gemini statistics program in fishscript
A Jekyll (static site builder) template that I have been using for the past two years to build class websites for my courses I'm teaching. In addition to being very simple and minimal it's also mobile-responsive.
Minimal Uni jekyll template on Github.
Minimal Bash blogging pipeline built around pandoc.
Geminut, a Gemini -> HTML markdown converter built for my own needs in Node.js
The following are programs I use that I didn't build but have made small contributions to.
I contributed the Slimey theme
I've been an advisor, bug reporter, mentor on several p5.js libraries and on core functionality. I use p5 for much of my own experimental generative web art explorations.
I've contributed several "collaborative cheatsheets" to this massive resource. It's made my CLI experience so much more pleasant. I love always having the ability get simple no-nonsense CLI suggestions for programs, especially ones I've just downloaded or rarely use. Much better than Man-pages!
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