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My favourite software
---------------------

I feel like I have so many things I want to phlog about quite badly that I could
spend the whole weekend on it - I *won't* of course, but the entries are *there*
and I can feel them pushing out against from my skull from the inside.
Frustrating!  Well, here's one thing popped off the stack, anyway.

In December I missed out on participating in a lot of conversation about
people's choices in software, mostly of the minimalist and Unixy bent[1,2].  I'd
been meaning to make a delayed contribution to this thread, and I was quite
excited when I thought Cat was doing the same thing with his recent phlog
entitled "My favourite software"[3].  Alas, the bastard was "just kidding".
Well, I'm not!

Like a lot of you, I have a strong preference for working from the command line,
and I mostly rely on "standard" unix tools which would not be exciting or new to
anybody.  I actively try to avoid getting dependent upon non-standard software,
even if it would make my life a little bit easier.  The only non-textual
programs I use on a regular basis are my browser (I will not actually recommend

No, not one), my mail client and some PDF viewer.

Previously, I used mutt for mail for a few years, and was more or less happy, but
eventually switched back to Sylpheed[4], something I have used for longer than I
can even recall.  No, not that newfangled fork Claws, but honest to God, made in
Japan Sylpheed.  I actually think a graphical mail client has benefits.  I like
being able to copy text from an email to the clipboard without worrying about
also selecting some random chunk of interface because my terminal is not aware
of the boundaries between panes.  I like being able to *click* on links and have
them open in my browser.  I like being able to scroll past thumbnails if
somebody sends me an email with attached photos.  Graphic mail clients are not
inherently bad, if they are small and light and let me turn off nonsense like
HTML email etc. then I have no beef with them, and Sylpheed gets a pass from me.

I think the only tools I use occasionally which are not widely known are hnb[5],
a ncurses-based "hierarchical notebook" for managing things like todo lists and
other reminders, and ncdu[6], a ncurses-based tool for finding files which are
hogging your diskspace.  Using ncdu sometimes makes me feel like a bit of a
lamer because I am sure a true greybeard would bust out some pipeline of
standard tools to do the same thing, but oh well.  I like it, it has allowed me
to happily put off organising my hard drive for many years by quickly finding
and deleting a handful of random large things that I decide I can live without
everytime I run out of disk space.

I have been using tiling window managers for over a decade now, and strongly
prefer them over anything else.  My "gateway drug" here was Ion[7], which I
thought was absolutely brilliant.  At some point, the developer of Ion went,
well, a little bit funny, went on an odd rampage about projects distributing
patched versions of Ion and still calling it "Ion", changed the license, then
abandoned the project, then went a lot funny and declared that Linux was worse
than Windows and abandoned free software entirely.  Well, at some point I moved
away from Ion (I don't recall exactly why, probably not just because it was
abandoned, I do not subscribe to the modern heresy that software becomes unusable
as soon as it stops being developed).  Nothing really felt as right, but I ended
up settling on Awesome for whatever reason and have used that for years without
really loving it.  Lately I have been experimenting with i3 (as used by
Tomasino[8] and probably others) on my work laptop and I like it a lot.  Maybe
I'll change my home machine over this weekend.

Finally, anybody who is genuinely interested in lightweight non-graphic software
for Unix owes it to themself to read every word every written by the great
prophet Kmandala.  This means their first blog, Motho ke motho ka botho[9], and
then their second blog, Inconsolation[10].  Kmandala is my spirit animal!  They
have (or had, anyway) a huge collection of old and "obsolete" laptops and a
driving passion for using lightweight Linux software to reinvigorate them, and
this turned into two epic blogs reviewing literally thousands of bits of
software that you would probably never hear of anywhere else.  All written in a
very accessible, lighthearted way.  Definitely worth checking out!


[1] gopher://grex.org:70/0/~jandal/phlog/favourite-programs-or-not
[2] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/jynx/dat/20171210.post
[3] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/cat/phlog/fs20180105.txt
[4] http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/
[5] https://github.com/gamaral/hnb
[6] https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_%28window_manager%29
[8] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/tomasino/phlog/20171015-i3
[9] https://kmandla.wordpress.com/
[10] https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/