Stuff I'm Using

As someone who is VERY particular about the technology I use, I thought I'd share what tools I utilize. This page has gone through many iterations, but instead writing 10 paragraphs of nerd-vomit, I think the main point I want to get communicate here is that, for personal use, I primarily buy second-hand equipment and encourage others to do the same. It not only reduces e-waste but 5+ year old smartphones and laptops are more than sufficient for not just my needs, but arguably the vast majority of people. They're more economical and usually easier to repair.

Hardware

• 2017 Thinkpad X1 Carbon (i7/16gb RAM/used) as my main production machine running Arch Linux and the GNOME desktop.
• Thinkpad USB-C Gen 2 Dock (used)
• Two 27" Monitors (used)
• Thinkpad wireless keyboard (I really love the trackpoint nipple)
• Logitech MX Master 3
• Raspberry Pi 5 (8gb) as my home server running Ubuntu Server 24.04. The services I run include a couple samba shares (for NAS), syncthing for syncing files across devices, and seeding torrents. In the future I intend to set up pi-hole to monitor/block advertising network traffic, as well as a VPN to connect to my network remotely.
• Pixel 4a (used) running LineageOS.
• Sony WH-CH710N wired/wireless headphones along with wired earbuds.

Software

I mostly work out of the terminal, hence the majority of the programs I use are terminal-based.

• LibreWolf - I could probably (and may eventually) write an entire post about LibreWolf. It's a fork of Firefox without all the useless features, with an emphasis on privacy and security. The two essential extensions I use is uBlock Origin and Vimium.
• Thunderbird - I've been using Thunderbird for a long time, I absolutely love it for managing my email and calendar.
• GNOME - I was one of the many people who hated GNOME 3 when it was released in 2011. I tried it out periodically, always walking away dissatisfied, but after switching from XFCE4 to GNOME earlier this year, I can say it's improved significantly, easy to configure, and doesn't get in the way.
• Kitty - my terminal emulator of choice. There's probably a better one out there, and maybe one day I'll try something else, but I love how tabs are integrated. I usually have several tabs open and switch between then with Alt+h and Alt+l.
• cmus - my music library manager, probably the best music application I've ever used.
• mpv - a media player with a minimal GUI. It plays just about everything I throw at it.
• ranger - a text-based file manager with vim key-bindings.
• newsboat - a fast RSS reader. In addition to handling a standard RSS/Atom feeds, I've configured it to either download or open YouTube videos in mpv.
• vim - my text editor of choice. In fact, this website's content, HTML, and CSS is managed/written in vim.
• epr - a CLI EPUB reader. I seldom actually read in the terminal, but it's a fun program.
• w3m - terminal-based web browser. Super useful for using text-focused websites like brutalist.report, alterslash.org, hn, and DuckDuckGo Lite.
• mutt - text-based email client. I still fall back on Thunderbird for those emails with HTML that don't seem to open properly from mutt.
• yt-dlp - Ripping YouTube videos and other things. Very useful when connected to newsboat, or when I want to rip a video to save locally.
• rtorrent - a BitTorrent client.
• ffmpeg - The gold standard for converting/reencoding media files.
• htop - system process monitor and manager.
• zathura - lightweight PDF viewer (with the MuPDF plugin), it has vim-like key-bindings.
• sxiv - a simple image viewer.
• SpeedCrunch - a scientific calculator with a keyboard driven interface.
• KeePassXC - a local password manager with a nice GUI.
• OnlyOffice - An office suite with high compatibility with MS Office filetypes. Outside of work and school, I really only use it for spreadsheets.
• sc-im - an ncurses based, vim-like spreadsheet calculator. This is a great terminal based spreadsheet program, but it's really unintuitive for me to use and takes me a bit to do simple calculations.
• calcurse - A text-based calendar and to-do application. I stopped using calcurse because I couldn't get it to sync properly with my email provider's CalDAV.
• pass - a terminal based password manager. It worked fantastically until I had issues with gpg. I may return to using this some day.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to send comments, questions, or recommendations to hey@chuck.is