Tools and Software I Use

The software I actually use day to day. I update this when things change. Inspired by Luke Smith’s page.

Operating Systems

• Void Linux — Daily driver on the desktop and the laptop. Independent, stable rolling release, runit for init, xbps for packages. It stays out of my way, which is really all I want from a distro.
• OpenBSD — Every server I run. The defaults are sane, the crypto is built in, and nothing surprises me. I wrote up the stack in my desktop notes.

Shell and Terminal

• oksh — My shell. POSIX, vi mode, fast. I keep the config in ~/.kshrc instead of .profile so it loads in st-wl-spawned shells too.
• st-wl — My fork of st, the suckless terminal, moved over to Wayland. Public repo coming soon at github.com/crodorg/st-wl.
• tmux — How I manage terminals now. One terminal open, split into tmux windows and panes for everything. I used to lean on the window manager for this, but tmux does it better and it follows me over SSH.

Window Manager

• dwl — The dwl take on dwm, so a tiny Wayland compositor. I run my own custom build.
• eww — Status bar and widgets.
• fuzzel — Launcher and menu for everything.

Editor

• nvim — Writing text, and most everything else.

File Management

• yazi — Terminal file manager. Fast, async, and the image previews work out of the box.

Web Browser

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

Mail

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

Media

• mpv — Video, streams, and music through a custom script.
• swayimg — Minimal Wayland image viewer, keybind-driven with a gallery mode like nsxiv had.
• zathura — PDFs, EPUB, and PostScript, with vim bindings.
• yt-dlp — Downloading video and audio. Wrapped in a custom yt script with fzf and chafa previews.
• chafa — Terminal image rendering. The previewer behind aerc and the yt script.

Documents

• TeX and OpTeX — Writing PDFs.
• sent — Suckless minimalist presentations. Patched to export a PDF for sharing.
• LibreOffice — When I have to deal with a Microsoft document.

Productivity

• pass — UNIX password manager. I front it with a custom launcher script that types the entry straight into the focused field.
• newsraft — Terminal RSS reader.
• transmission-remote — CLI torrent client.

Image Editing

• GIMP — Raster editing.
• ImageMagick — magick on the command line. I used it to vectorize the site logo with potrace.

Development

• git — Version control. Bare repos hosted on a local router over git-shell.
• Hugo — What this site is built with.
• Claude Code — My LLM coding assistant. More in my post on keeping AI small.

Self-hosted (on OpenBSD VPS)

• httpd — Web server.
• relayd — TLS termination and security headers.
• acme-client — Let’s Encrypt automation.
• OpenSMTPD — Mail SMTP.
• Dovecot — Mail IMAP.
• prosody — XMPP server. Self-hosted chat, I talk to it with profanity.
• 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 my configs live in ~/dotfiles/, driven by one plain-text manifest. My dotsync (capture) and install.sh (deploy) scripts both read it. The forks I build from source, st-wl and dwl, are tracked alongside.