Tools

Tools I use and relevant configurations (passwords not included).

Gentoo

Technically an OS, but isn’t an OS just a another very general tool?

I’ve tried many distros from Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Linux Mint, Arch Linux, but I’ve always come back to Gentoo. I just like compiling stuff, I guess.

x11-wm/i3

Tiling window managers FTW! The first one I tried was Ion, I’ve also used XMonad and bspwm, but have eventually settled on i3.

app-editors/vim

(vimrc)

I started out with Emacs years ago, eventually tried out vim-tutor and have not been able to go back to Emacs without modal editing. I tried Spacemacs and DOOM Emacs (the latter I stuck with for about a year), but it was never quite right.

I try to stick as closely to vanilla Vim (not Neovim) as possible. That way, I don’t have to do a lot of configuration to be productive in Vim on a fresh install.

app-admin/pass

All my password management is accomplished with pass. I couple it with passmenu to have a handy keyboard shortcut to grab a password I need. I tried out the Firefox extension for pass, but it got in the way more than it helped.

Managing more than one machine and synchronizing the password stores is as simple as pass git push and pass git pull.

I have a subfolder that encrypts keys with a different key for work, so the same store can reside on my private machines while keeping the work passwords safe.

mail-client/mutt & mail-client/isync

I use https://migadu.com as my email “provider”. It’s basically bring-your-own-domain and they’ll handle the email aspect of it.

I used neomutt for a while, but have reverted to mutt. As I understood it, neomutt was a response to mutt’s development being stalled, but mutt is actively being developed today.

net-irc/weechat

I’ve shopped around for various IRC clients, and so far have tried Irssi, Weechat and Senpai. Irssi I found weirdly charming but difficult to configure. Then I found Weechat and stayed with that for a while. Running senpai basically helped me realise that what I want in an IRC client is as little clutter as possible. Weechat has all the configurability I want to make the interface as minimal as I want it, plus it has none of the problems that I experienced with Senpai.

I run my own IRC bouncer soju now with the weechat plugin.