/Uses

This page covers some of the hardware and software I use in my daily life and work. It can be nice to see what other people are using, I’ve discovered plenty of tools I use today from lists like this, so I figured I’d create one too.

Hardware

• Thinkpad X1 Carbon: I like small and require a trackpoint so there is no competition.
• Synology DS218+: This has been pretty solid. A selling point for me was they use btrfs and has hardware accelerated video transcoding. It is also where I run pihole.
• Pixel 7a: We use Google Fi for our service and I again prefer smaller and don’t need much power, so I always go with the “a” versions.

Things I use less because I tend to work from my laptop:

• Logitech MX Ergo: When I’m not using the trackpoint I use a trackball.

Software

• Fedora: I’ve been through a lot of distros in the past almost 2 decades. In the last few years I’ve moved to Fedora and been quite happy. The key things that motivated my move are Fedora’s move to btrfs and that it tends to have a more recent kernel than other non-rolling release distros.
• stow: Before getting into the rest since many of them rely on dotfiles I have to call out stow which I use to manage my dotfiles into a single repository.
• zsh: My config is a mixture of things now, but checkout Oh My Zsh and powerlevel10k. I guess I need to move on to something new from p10k, maybe Starship.
  • And I have to call out zsh-autosuggestions which gives fish like command completions. I didn’t want to switch to fish but really liked this feature when I tried out fish so was happy to find a plugin for Zsh.
• Emacs: A few modes I’ll call out:
  • lsp-mode: I had a lot of issues with lsp’s that turned me off of them for a long time but recently have been having success with lsp-mode and the Erlang Language Platform.
  • org-mode: Not just how I keep notes and track what to do, it is also how we write Adopting Erlang. See the repo for how that is done with ox-hugo to generate a Hugo site hosted on Netlify.
  • magit: The best interface for git.
  • consult, vertico, orderless: Command search and navigation stuff.
  • project-tab-groups: I use the built in project.el for managing projects and this will make a tab per project.
• foot: No complaints with foot but I have been trying out ghostty as well.
• fzf: Fuzzy finding.
• rofi: A Wayland supporting fork. This is how I run apps.
• Fastmail: My email provider. I’ve been happy with the webapp and Android app for many years now.
• Bitwarden: Storing my passwords and stuff.
• orgzly: Viewing org-mode files on my phone.
• syncthing: Mainly syncing org-mode files to my phone.
• Tailscale: Tailscale has been great for easily connecting my devices and allowing syncthing to do its thing.
• Ansible: I have a playbook for setting up my machine after getting tired of doing it manually every time I got a new work machine or reinstalled.
• Hyprland: My move to Wayland started with Sway but I really prefer dynamic tiling (I was on XMonad prior to Sway). Hyprland has been the most complete and stable of the available dynamic tiling options. But I’m openly looking for alternatives as I await XMonad Wayland :)… I plan to even give a DE’s tiling a shot when COSMIC DE is more complete.
• grocy: Recipe storage I’ve been trying to get myself using over org-mode.

Programming specific:

• erlup: I created this tool in part as a way to learn Rust and because I preferred the, now unmaintained, erln8 way of handling switching versions by routing all calls through a single binary.
• mise: For everything else, aside from Rust which I just use rustup, I’ve been using mise recently.
• Zeal: For viewing documentation. I just wish it could handle stuff like Hex the way Dash does.