Tools and Software I Use

The software I use day to day. Updated when things change. Inspired by Luke Smith’s similar page.

Operating Systems

• Void Linux — Daily driver on desktop and laptop. Independent stable rolling-release distro, runit init, xbps package manager.
• OpenBSD — All my servers. Sane defaults, integrated cryptography, no surprises. See my notes on the server stack.

Shell and Terminal

• oksh — Default shell. POSIX, vi mode, fast. Configured in ~/.kshrc rather than .profile so it loads in st-spawned shells too.
• st — Suckless terminal. Custom-patched for sixel graphics and color emoji (libXft-BGRA).
• tmux — Used only over SSH. Locally the WM tiles better.

Window Manager

• dwm — Suckless tiling window manager.
• dwmblocks-async — Status bar.
• dmenu — Launcher and menu for everything.

Editor

• nvim — Composing text and almost everything else.

File Management

• lf — Terminal file manager. Configured with chafa-sixel image preview.

Web Browser

• Firefox — Hardened with arkenfox user.js plus a small set of extensions: uBlock Origin, Skip Redirect, and LocalCDN, and Dark Reader.

Mail

• aerc — Terminal mail client. HTML rendering via Firefox on F.
• isync (mbsync) — IMAP sync to local maildir.
• msmtp — SMTP sender. Passwords pulled from pass.
• goimapnotify — Push notifications for the main account.

Media

• mpv — Video, streams, custom music script, and online music.
• nsxiv — Image viewer with thumbnail mode.
• zathura — Document/PDF, EPUB, and PS viewer with vim bindings.
• yt-dlp — YouTube and video downloader. Wrapped in a custom yt script with fzf and sixel preview.
• chafa — Terminal image rendering. The shared previewer for lf, nnn, aerc, and the yt script.

Documents

• TeX and OpTeX — Writing PDFs.
• sent — Suckless minimalist presentations. PDF patch for sharing.
• LibreOffice — Occasional Microsoft document compatibility.

Productivity

• pass — UNIX password manager. Frontended via a custom dmenu-pass script that types entries with xdotool.
• newsraft — Terminal RSS reader.
• transmission-remote — CLI torrent client.

Image Editing

• GIMP — Photoshop-style raster editing.
• ImageMagick — magick for command-line image manipulation. Used to vectorize the site logo with potrace.

Development

• git — Version control. Bare repos hosted on a local router via git-shell.
• Hugo — This site is built with it.
• Claude Code — LLM dev assistant. See my post on AI workflow.

Self-hosted (on OpenBSD VPS)

• httpd — Web server.
• relayd — TLS termination and security headers.
• acme-client — Let’s Encrypt automation.
• OpenSMTPD — Mail SMTP client.
• Dovecot — Mail IMAP client.
• pf — Firewall.
• Mumble — Open-source low-latency voice chat server (umurmur). Self-hosted for talking with friends and family. No accounts, no metadata, encrypted by default.

Dotfiles

All configurations versioned in ~/dotfiles/, driven by a single plain-text manifest. Both my dotsync (capture) and install.sh (deploy) scripts read it. Suckless source builds (dwm, st, dwmblocks-async, dmenu) are tracked alongside.