exobrain | Tools, or how I do everything

Tools, or how I do everything

This is an extension of 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. On a regular day, the only GUI tools I use are my browser and my email client.

Shells
- zsh - for the fish-like highlighting and auto completion, while still being somewhat posix compliant. 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
- alacritty, with pretty basic defaults
- I also use tmux to handle terminal sessions, use tmuxp to handle common background tasks
OS-stuff
- Linux Distribution (though I’m forced to use Mac for work sometimes)
  - Arch
- Window Managers
  - i3-gaps - am used to it at this point, and I’m a big fan of the manual tiling, especially for multiple monitors. qtile had some graphical issues for bad GUI apps, and I don’t feel like messing up my haskell installation for xmonad
- MacOS, I use amethyst to tile windows, and 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)
- i3lock for screen lock; daemon process caches pixelated version of screen to speed up start time. Corresponding service file to lock my screen whenever my laptop suspends
- rofi for launching applications and switching windows
- dunst for notifications, pretty normal configuration
- lightdm as display manager, just so I don’t have to fiddle with xprofile
Editors
- nvim (primarily)
- (doom) emacs
Browsers
- firefox-developer-edition, with extensions:
  - 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. I now sit feet away from my laptop with mechanical keyboard in hand, reaching over only for horrible sites which don’t comply to the HTML standard (looking at you, clicking the next episode button on Netflix)
  - 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
  - Refined Github for general Github improvements
  - Stylus, so I can dark mode common websites
  - Dark Reader, so I can dark mode every website I visit. Does have considerable overhead, so I prefer finding CSS through stylus for websites I visit often
  - uBlock Origin to block ads
- I use lynx to do quick duckduckgo searches without leaving the terminal
I use newsboat RSS 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
For system backups, I use a script which rsync’s a bunch of directories to my raspberry pi
to-do list - todotxt for todos, with a rofi interface as GUI, and TUI for adding todos. The TUI I wrote forces me to specify a deadline for each todo, which I then get notified by this, which runs on my server
calcurse as a calendar, with my calcurse-load hooks to add Google Calendar and todo.txt to calcurse automatically
a heavily customized ranger as my file manager. See rifle.conf (file handler) and scope.sh (previewer)
yadm to manage dotfiles. Once I have a terminal running, my bootstrap script sets up my system entirely
For basic image cropping, I use pinta. 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 edited version of this mpv plugin
For previewing markdown/latex while I’m editing it, I have my own compile and live-render scripts
Use the dict:// protocol with curl at dict.org as a dictionary with this. moby as a thesaurus
On top of all the git aliases, one of my scripts I use most commonly are my giturl/gitopen scripts, which will open the current git directory I’m in in my browser
ix to create pastebin links from the command line
To host files publicly and mirror video/audio, I use my remsync and mediaproxy scripts. croc is nice, but that assumes the other person has terminal literacy
the mvlast/mvlastpic/lastdown collection of scripts, which lets me quickly move items from my Downloads/Screenshots to my current folder. Was taken from an https://rwx.gg stream; very basic but incredibly useful
vipe, to quickly edit my clipboard in a vim buffer
curl "https://cheat.sh/$*", to access quick cheatsheets for unix tools
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
ldm, to do basic drive mounting for external drives/USBs
my own password generator
A bash script (bgproc) with an infinite loop which runs in the background instead of cron (uses my evry tool to schedule tasks)
my bash terminal playlist manager using fzf/mpv to store playlists for local music in local text files
my own url shortener with this script
imgur-uploader to quickly upload images online, with a script to upload my most recent screenshot to imgur
mpv/chatterino to watch twitch, see here
fzf everywhere, to fuzzy match in shell pipelines
youtube-dl to download video/audio from hundreds of websites
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
datamash to perform basic statistics on text files
dex to open .desktop files
dust; a fancy du clone
entr for lots of small build scripts
fd; a fancy find clone
figlet to print large letters
glow to render markdown in the terminal
hyperfine to do benchmarks
imgur-uploader to push images to imgur
jpegtran to compress JPEG files
jq/gron to process json streams
linkcheck to check for broken links on websites
lorem to create a bunch of lorem-ipsum
misspell corrects commonly misspelled words; my misspell-context script to give mistakes in context
ncdu to preview disk space interactively
oh-my-stars to search github stars offline
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
screenkey when recording demonstrations to display keys
shellcheck to check shell scripts for syntax errors
speedtest-cli to test internet bandwidth
sqleton to visualize sqlite databases
sxiv as an image viewer for more complicated/macro-like tasks
termdown to countdown in the terminal
toilet is another implementation of figlet, gives fancy colors in the terminal
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
whiptail (libnewt) for fancy dialog prompts in scripts
wuzz, a postman-like CLI application

Other GUI Applications I use less often

robomongo to explore mongoDB databases
sqlitebrowser to explore sqlite databases
simplescreenrecorder to do simple screen recordings; I use this to make demonstration gifs