Why software do you use in your day-to-day computing which might not be well-known?
For me, there are two three things for personal information management:
-
for shopping receipts, notes and such, I write them down using vim on a small Gemini PDA with a keyboard. I transfer them via scp to a Raspberry Pi home server on from there to my main PC. Because it runs on Sailfish OS, it also runs calendar (via CalDav) and mail nicely - and without any FAANG server.
-
for things like manuals and stuff that is needed every few months (“what was just the number of our gas meter?” “what is the process to clean the dishwasher?”) , I have a Gollum Wiki which I have running on my Laptop and the home Raspi server. This is a very simple web wiki which supports several markup languages (like Markdown, MediaWiki, reStructuredText, and Creole), and stores them via git. For me, it is perfect to organize personal information around the home.
-
for work, I use Zim wiki. It is very nice for collecting and organizing snippets of information.
-
oh, and I love Inkscape(a powerful vector drawing program), Xournal (a program you can write with a tablet on and annotate PDFs), and Shotwell (a simple photo manager). The great thing about Shotwell is that it supports nicely to filter your photos by quality - and doing that again and again with a critical eye makes you a better photographer.
Ed Along with rlwrap it gives me a very fast and powerful workflow.
Rlwrap It wraps around a program and gives it the ability to make use ofthe readline lib.
Screen I use it when I boot without X. Gives a very fast workflow, being able to switch between programs.
Mpv Multimedia powerhouse. Even works (pretty) well without X, with a framebuffer.
Ecasound Cli daw. Have several scripts to make a recording on the fly or to be able to jam.
ed (which is the more frugal, older brother of vi/vim) might indeed be a bit under-hyped. Which advantages does it have for you?
Funny thing a while ago I had a small side-project for a data collection task in my PDA - a kind of minimal database to record daily stuff. So, a PDA has limited screen space and typing speed, and I tried to make the UI with as little typing as possible. And then it dawned to me that I was essentially replicating ed’s interface!
I primarily edit groff-, shell- and (small) c-files. I like it to simply search a line make the edit and move on.
All my groff and c projects have makefiles, with ‘m’ being an alias for ‘make’. So a simple ‘w’ and ‘!m’ will do.
I use ‘z’ a lot to view portions of the file.
If I need to transfer a part of a file to another file I simly write that part to a temporary file and import it.
There are some situations when I open vi instead. Primarily when I have to escape a lot of characters to make the edit.
Fun thing by the way, one can use Emacs without X, and then it is like screen - only with an editing window at the outermost shell.
And also, one can have the same space efficiency in text mode within X: Using the ratpoison or Stumpwm window managers.
I simply never tried emacs. No special reason for it. Moved from Kate to Vim to Vi to Ed. And kept using the last two from then on.
Maybe I’ll take a look at it someday.