@readwithai - X - blog - machine-aided reading
I am a programmer so I make my own tools. Sometimes these are mean to to change the world in some way. Some they are tools I mean for getting things done while attempting to change the world. Sometimes a mixture of the two. But where possible, I try to use existing tools for the task I need to get done. Here are some of the tools I use.
At the core of everything I use a keyboard. This lets me write down what I think and try to convince other people to do things. I use my own keymapping (symbolboard) which puts all the modifier controls (control, alt, super) on the number keys so that they are easy to press at the same time. It’s designed to let me swap to any keyboard without having to relearn anything. I’ve implemented this one a view different keybinding systems. At the moment, I’m using keyd which allows you to easily defining keymaps at the kernel - in the past I have used xmodmap and xkb but I eventually had problems with both due to how certain apps interacted with them.
I use X and substack where I try to convince people that what I am doing is interesting, that what I think is true, and that they can change what they are doing and generally interact with the world. I need a browser to do this, so I use Brave . I used firefox for a long time, but they had some bugs related to image pasting and also had some bad policies related to data so I switched to brave. I’ve used Wikipedia for this as well - but there you only get to tell people what is true by making an encyclopedia more correct - you do get to tell a lot of people though.
I am programmer so when something annoys me or I do it a lot I make tools to help me. For this I use the linux command-line quite a bit. I use zsh it’s slightly nicer than bash but probably isn’t too different. I just use it. I’m pretty lazy so I use my own snippet system zshnip that lets me define snippets as I go. I tend to insert a lot of links when I’m writing things so I use xclip to copy things to and from the clipboard for linking. I made a tool called brave-bookmarks to quickly copy links to my bookmarks and also have some tools to interact with my substack pages. I use fzf to select things because it removes the needs to type things. I use FFmpeg together with xclip to quickly take screenshots which I can paste into things. I occasionally use vidir when I want to quickly change a files name.
When note trying to get people’s attention I do make some things! I use Emacs for coding. I use vim bindings via evil-mode. For thinking, learning and planning I use Obsidian. In Obsidian I make lots of use of maps of content based on dataview. I have some plugins to speed up things that I find annoying. I have my own plugin called Plugin REPL which lets me automate commonly used things. I use git a lot. I also use the github command line tool gh a bit because I’m often creating new repositories for tools I share.
I often need to share data between the different tools I use. I use KDE with its windows tiling to quickly switch between applications and let me see two applications at the same time and I have keybindings to switch between apps for this I mostly use wmctrl.