Software I use these days

Quick post listing software I use for work these days. I am curious how this list will read in 20 years.

Some of these tools might seem outdated in 2023, but I like to KISS, as it helps me stay focused (although perhaps my perception of the tools others use is not well-calibrated and they are similarly simple).

• Tmux. Tmux allows you to access multiple terminal sessions in a single window, but this description does not do it justice. I encourage you strongly to give a good try if you haven’t.

  I cannot see myself living without Tmux. I never managed to thank the person who told me to check it out, but I’m so grateful.

• Neovim I have tried many text editors, but Vim/Neovim is just the best for me. The only difference between my setup and old-fashioned bare-bones Vim is the use of linters and a few plugins.

  Interestingly, I haven’t found Large Language Model-driven tools like Copilot to be useful enough in my day-to-day to warrant integration with Neovim. Rather, I use them when I have to program something in a new language or framework and resort to ChatGPT or web search instead.

• Joplin My choice of note-taking software. Markdown-based. It’s cross-platform, so I can use it on my phone and computer, synced automatically through Dropbox. It has a Vim mode and even let’s you open notes in Neovim.

  There are many note-taking apps out there, but I am confident Joplin will stand the stand of time because of how solid the core functionality is and its markdown-based approach. That doesn’t mean it’s bare-bones though, you can write Mermaid diagrams, export to PDF, attach files, and so on.

• Inkscape My go-to graphics editor every time I have to make a diagram or figure. It’s so good.

• Zotero Reference manager which allows you to organize, well, references and their PDFs. It includes cloud-backup functionality.

• mardown-slides Very simple script I wrote to generate HTML slides from markdown, sufficient for simple presentations. The script simply wraps around Revealjs. I have also tried Quarto, which I plan on using more going forward.

• Pandoc Markdown to PDF, with LaTeX as an intermediate step. It sometimes makes Markdown feel a bit like next-gen LaTeX.

• LaTeX Plain-text software for typesetting. I often wonder what will be the thing that replaces LaTeX. Maybe a standardized variant of Markdown? I often use LaTeX through Overleaf for collaborative writing, or through Pandoc to avoid writing in pure LaTeX and write Markdown instead.

• ssh I mean, ssh was obviously going to be on this list. I use it everyday.

• Telegram My work-related use of Telegram is not as an instant messaging platform, but as a replacement for most (not all) of my use of sftp, scp and rsync. I use telegram-send, a script to send ZIP archives automatically from a server to my laptop/phone/etc. rsync et al are better suited for large file transfers, though.

Notable mentions include fish shell, autojump, Pop!_OS (and Arch), Bitwarden, Google Scholar.