I love tinkering with my environment. So much so that I've been known to spend more time tinkering than I actually end up using the particular tool or utility I just put in place. Regardless, I'm a huge fan of neat tools that improve my software engineering workflows or just general usage of my machines. I'm continuously expanding this list as I find new tools and recall ones that I already use.

Command Line Tools

Command line tools are my bread and butter. Here's a selection of my favorite tools.

autojump - cd that learns!

• Instead of cd ~/path/to/my/best-project, just type j best-project!
• Finds the directory I want the vast majority of the time

neovim - The future (and present) of Vim

• You know what it is, it's Vim. But better.
• I use it for everything. That's the largest appeal for me. One editor for all my editing needs.

nushell - A shell with data processing capabilities

• Modern and powerful shell
• Incorporates functionality equivalent of tools like jq and awk directly into the shell
• You kind of have to try it out to understand - I use it more and more when I need to do quick data processing

fzf - The best fuzzy finder around

• A fuzzy finder allowing you to search through text with inexact (fuzzy) search terms
• Great integration with neovim

ghostty - A powerful GPU-accelerated terminal emulator

• A new and shiny terminal emulator
• GPU-accelerated => very fast and supports things like inline images

hl - An incredibly useful JSON log viewer

• View JSON-formatted log output in a nicely formatted fashion
• Easily search and filter logs

jq - Command line JSON processor

• Allows for easy querying of JSON data in pretty much any shell
• Essential tool unless you use a shell like nushell

kanata - QMK but for any keyboard

• A keyboard manager with powerful functionality like tap-hold
• More or less QMK that runs on the host machine instead of on the keyboard

kitty - Another powerful GPU-accelerated terminal emulator

• Pretty much the same thing as ghostty

pgcli - A powerful CLI client for PostgreSQL

• More user friendly version of psql
• Can do stuff like
  • Auto-complete ON of JOIN-clause based on foreign keys
  • Saved queries with parameters that can be invoked by name

ripgrep - grep, but fast!

• An incredibly fast implementation of the classic grep utility
• Great integration with neovim

tmux - The best terminal multiplexer!

• A great terminal multiplexer, letting you run multiple programs in a single terminal!
• Large amount of plugins and themes to customize it to your liking
  • But I run mostly vanilla

tldr - Short and concise man pages

• Super short man pages that give just the bare minimum of information to use a tool
• Very often, precisely what you need!

tshark

• CLI version of Wireshark

qmk - Keyboard software for microcontrollers

• The most popular keyboard software for home-built keyboards
• My QMK configuration

yazi - Terimnal file manager on steroids

• Fast and easy-to-use terminal file manager
• Integrates very well with GPU-powered terminal emulators (kitty, ghostty) - can show image previews and the like

zellij - Modern alternative to tmux

• A terminal multiplexer that shares many of the features of tmux
• Easy to get into thanks to the always-on-screen keyboard bindings - I recommend this to anyone that isn't yet entrenched in tmux!
• Unlike tmux, provides a good experience out-of-the-box

GUI utilities

I don't use a whole lot of GUI utilities, but I've found a few really neat ones over the years.

Edgeshark

• Show network topologies of containers
• Incredibly easy to get up and running with Docker
• Can be integrated with Wireshark/TShark via cshargextcap

i3 - Improved tiling window manager

• A tiling window manager - once you go tiling, you never go back!
  • Seriously, try it. You'll wonder why you ever had floating windows.
• Relatively easy to get started with
• Highly customizable

warpd - Navigate GUIs with your keyboard

• Navigate your GUIs using your keyboard
• Fantastic for use with a laptop

Wireshark

• Capture and analyze network traffic

zeal - Offline docs

• Keep your docs locally on your machine instead of having to navigate to a docs website
• Comes out-of-the-box with docs for most major programming languages, like Python, Java, Kotlin, JavaScript, GoLang, Rust, C etc.
• If that's not enough, you can create your own docsets
• For MacOs users, dash does exactly the same thing

slimbook-battery - Battery/performance management

• Neat GUI for managing battery and performance settings
• Note: The current release (v4.0.8) does not work with newer versions of the Linux kernel (6.4.2 or later). Prerelease of v4.0.9 exists and works fine.

sway - i3 under Wayland

• Tiling compositor for Wayland
• Nearly drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager

Note taking and blogging

While apps like LoqSeq, Obsidian and Notion are all the rage right now, I prefer simpler solutions.

pelican - An extensible static site generator

• Write Markdown (or reStructuredText), get a static web site!
• This blog is created with Pelican