2024-10-19

Programs that I use on a daily basis

Intro

I have a sorta’ minimal setup. I am biased and I mostly use what works for me. I, for the most part try to adhere to the UNIX Philosophy:

Do one thing and do it right.

Also, influenced by the Suckless Phylosophy. So, I am basically DOOMED! hehe.

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| A genius admires simplicity... |
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Setups

Operating System: I use Void Linux. Which is an independent distribution. I am a fan of xbps package manager. It’s fast and doesn’t break as much as Artix (or Arch) does, which I had been using for the past 5 years. Also, it does not use SystemD.
As for my home server (yes, I have a small home server), I use OpenBSD. It’s simple, comes bundled with sane default tools.
As for my toy (read research) Operating System, I use Plan9. And my remark is-
Such an elegant piece of art.
Window Manager: Dynamic Window Manager - DWM. It’s fast, hackable, easier to understand source code, doesn’t consume a lot of memory. I have my own build, pretty minimal with just some sane patches applied.
Terminal Emulator: Simple Terminal - st (Luke Smith’s Build) Same principle as DWM. Luke’s build is almost perfect that I didn’t bother having my own build.
Shell: fish the Friendly Interactive Shell*. I have used zsh for a long time. Fish provides me the customization I have to make in order for zsh to work. Yet, it’s slow in my experience. I don’t care about POSIX in my day to life inside shell, I am not writing scripts in fish. I just use it as a default user shell to get my job done.
Editor/IDE: Vim. Vim. Vim. It’s less of a text editor and more of a lifestyle for me. I can’t think of using any other text editor except vim. But, the motion, I use it everywhere I can. Nowadays, I use Neovim (technically the same thing or not). It’s a bit faster. But, I do feel overwhelmed by the lua api. Hehe.
NO, I donot use many plugins. Just a few of them that makes my life easier.

GUI Programs

Browser: Brave Browser with an insane amount of extensions.
Why not a minimal web browser?
The web is bloated and broken and requires a ‘modern’ (read bloated) web browser. I really like the design philosophy of minimal web browsers like, surf, qutebrowser, nyxt, vieb and so on. But, they are far from usable. The most success I could get with is qutebrowser.
Why not Firefox?
Don’t get me wrong. I love Firefox. I just don’t have a good hardware to run the Gecko Engine.¹
See the browser extensions section to about my day-to-day most used extensions.
File Manager: I for the most part donot use or need a file manager. cd is enough. If I must have to use a file manager, it’s lf or for GUI it’s PCManFM.
Image Viewer: Sxiv. Why not? Suckless, fast, extensible.
Video & Audio: mpv is THE BEST video player ever created. Lol.

Tools

Dmenu - A suckless menu literally has the power to be anything.
Slock - A suckless screenlock.
Xmenu - A window manager agnostic suckless context menu.
farbfeld - A lossless image format.
sent - A presentation tool. Focus more on the content rather than silly animation and colours.
$L^{A}T_{E}X$ - A bloated document preparation system. Use groff(1) instead.
groff - Front-end for the groff(1) document formatting system.
pandoc - A general markup converter.
eza - A better ls(1) & successor of exa.
bat - A better cat(1).
delta - A better diff(1).

Browser Extensions

This part is so bloated. Stay away…

General:
- Dark Reader: Heals you eyes by turning every webpage dark.
- Scrollbar Customizer: Hides ugly scrollbar in chromium and saves spaces.
- Vimium C: Makes me a hackerrr while I am using my browser. Power of VI navigation within the browser.
- Firenvim: Turns any text field into a (neo)vim buffer.
Privacy:
- uBlock Origin: Unfortunately dead in the chormium side. :(
- User Agent Switcher
Competitive Programming: I do Competitive Programming. :D
- Carrot: Rating predictor for Codeforces.
- CF Analytics: Analyse Codeforces profiles.
- CF World Standings: Filters the standings for a given contest on Codeforces to show only active competitors of a specific country.
- Codeforces Enhancer: Multiple ratings graph, colorizes standings, adds “Hide/Show solved problems” link.
- Codeforces Practice Tracker: Track practice progress on Codeforces.
- Competitive Companion: Parses competitive programming problems and sends them to various tools like CP Editor and CPH. I use it with a CP plugin in Neovim.

My dots

You can find them here: https://github.com/saifshahriar/dotfiles