System Configuration

I try to keep as much of my configuration as possible in this repo. I symlink my dotfiles into the appropriate locations. I also use the scripts in the systems directory to initialize new machines and keep them up to date later. The top-level configure.sh script detects the current system and runs the appropriate script.

Remapping caps lock

The best tip I ever got for switching away from a default setting was to change my caps lock key to function as both escape and control. On every OS, there is a way to make caps lock work as escape when tapped and control when held down. Check out this blog post on how to do it.

Terminal toolkit

• clipboard-cli for a cross-platform way to access the system clipboard
• ctop for monitoring containers
• diff2html-cli for viewing side by side Git diffs
• Docker for development environments
  • Containerization means it's much lighter than VM solutions like Vagrant
  • Supported by many CI services
• Git for source control
  • I tried to do a merge in SVN once. Never again.
• Glances for system monitoring
• Neofetch for system show off screenshots
• opn-cli for opening files using the default program
• tldr for when man is overkill
• tmux for multiplexing
• Tokei for counting code statistics
• Vim and Visual Studio Code for text editing
  • vim-plug to manage the plugins
  • See the .vimrc for a list of plugins
• Z shell for the shell

Replacements for Unix commands

• bat for replacing cat
• exa for replacing ls
• fd for replacing find
• fzf for a general purpose fuzzy finder
  • Jump to directories (making cd somewhat obsolete) with fzf-marks
  • Open files without navigating to the directory
• htop for replacing top
• ripgrep for replacing grep
  • The announcement blog post is a great read

Structured text processing

These are the ones I keep installed, but you can reference this list, which is much more comprehensive.

• jq for JSON
• xsv for CSV

Languages

• JavaScript / TypeScript / Node
  • I'm excited about WebAssembly though
• Python
  • Just plain fun
• Rust
  • Need more project ideas
• Go
  • On the to learn list, especially ever since I read Rob Pike's Less is exponentially more
• Haskell
  • Also on the to learn list

Desktop applications

Cross platform

• Firefox Developer Edition
• Google Chrome
• VLC for playing any video that I can throw at it

Linux

• Terminator for terminal emulation

Mac

• Duet Display to use an iPad as another display
• iTerm2 for terminal emulation
• Rectangle for window management

Services

• Todoist for keeping track of what I need to do

---