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

• any* browsers here, I am now convinced that in 2017 there are no good browsers.

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/