Stuff I Use

This page lists stuff I actually use and think is worth recommending, mainly software. I’ll try to keep this reasonably up to date.

Emacs

I’m a heavy Emacs user and enthusiast. Every text-oriented task that I can do in it, I end up moving into it eventually. If you are a programmer or writer, I highly recommend trying it out. Bewarned of the infamous learning curve, but personally I think it’s worth it.

Of course, no mention of Emacs is complete without mentioning packages for it. Here are some of the ones I use.

Straight.el

Straight.el is the “Next-generation, purely functional package manager for the Emacs hacker.” And it lives up to its name. I consider this an essential package, since it makes managing other packages manageable. Straight.el lets you reproduce your entire emacs configuration, packages and all, from just your config file and a (optionally) a version lockfile. Also, it has a decentralized approach, where it actually grabs the code repositories, history and all, of all the packages you use. And you can edit any of them directly to make your own changes/contributions.

Org-mode

Org-mode is often considered one of the “killer apps” of Emacs, for good reason. It’s hard to directly describe fully, but the tagline is “Your Life in Plain Text”. I’ll just list some of the things I do with it (in no particular order): Writing prose, writing literate programs, making slides for presentations, task/todo/time tracking, and keeping a hyperlinked personal knowledgebase.

evil-mode

Emacs can be a great text editor (and pseudo-operating system), but that doesn’t mean it has great keybindings for working with structured text in the form of source code. Evil-mode provides this, by bringing vim into emacs. If you are coming from vim, you can expect it to work as you expect (with improvements, even).

Syncthing

The file syncing tool to use. Forget Dropbox™ or other proprietary solutions—this is what you want. It works smoothly, requiring basically no maintenence after initial setup, and is fully decentralized (for real, unlike much of the snake oil under the decentralized label these days). There are no arbitrary limitations on how you can use it either, as it is Freedom-respecting software. Highly recommended.

Linux

This one was so obvious to me that I almost didn’t even mention it. I’ve been using Linux as my main operating system for many years, and I would recommend it to most people. The particulars of Linux itself are not too important, just that it is a (relatively) high-quality, well-supported, Freedom-respecting operating system. It is a breath of fresh air to run a computer free of arbitrary corporate meddling, and I think everyone with even a passing interest in computers should at least try it out. Note that Linux is probably not a one-to-one replacement for your current operating system if you are heavily invested in corporate infrastructure, but if you are, you probably aren’t interested anyway.

On this topic, Linux is just a kernel (the piece of software that provides enough infrastructure for other software to run without needing to know too much about the underlying machine), and typically comes to the end user via organizations called distributions (or ‘distros’ for short), which bundle it with other software to produce a full usable operating system. The distributions I mainly use are Arch Linux and Alpine Linux, for desktop and server use respectively. But I have used many other distributions over the years and try to keep abrest of new developments in this area.

My current recommendation if you are a beginner is to install PopOS. It is a distribution that tries to make things easy to use out of the box, maintained by a company that has skin in the game for doing so—they sell computers to end users (that’s you) with Linux preinstalled.