TITLE="Andrea Corsini's computing" DESCRIPTION="List and comments about my daily personal computing, softwares and hardware I use." --- <h2>My Computing</h2> <p>You can find a short list of the main softwares I use daily on my personal drives. My personal daily computing regards browsing the internet, checking my emails, occasional coding and writing.</p> <p>Although I do nothing fancy and complicated, I do have some requirements. The main concerns are about <b>control</b> and <b>lightweightness</b>. I want to be in charge of the computations that happen on my machine, what is running and what is not. I want to control which software is using bandwidth. I want to be able to check the behaviour of any of my software, and potentially change it to confomr it to my needs. I want to be the user, not to be used. These thoughts are pretty much what the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation (FSF)</a> and the <a href="">GNU project</a> is advocating.</p> <p>Not as important as the freedom on computing, I wish, whenever possible, that the softwares I use are unbloated. I prefer lightweight over fancy. That is why I don't mind to use <em>Terminal User Interfaces (TUI)</em> over GUI when is convinient to do so.</p> <dl> <dt>Operative System</dt> <dd>I normally run <a href="https://www.archlinux.org">Arch</a>-based distributions, because once installed, they contains only essential softwares to get started, no unwanted bloat and I can build my personal desktop directly. In particular I run <a href="">Parabola GNU/Linux-libre</a>, an FSF-approved 100% free (<a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw">as in: freedom</a>) operating system. Not any computer can run a 100% free distribution, due to nonfree firmware blobs (more about it in the <a href="#hardware">hardware section</a> below). So in other secondary laptops that cannot run Parabola, my fallback is plain Arch Linux.</dd> <dt>Window Manager/Desktop Environment</dt> <dd>I don't have a desktop environment, except for the collection of scripts, softwares and configurations that I have put together. I run the <a href="https://suckless.org/">Suckless</a> window manager called <a href="https://dwm.suckless.org/">dwm</a> with several patches applied on it. Apart from the keybings for main programs, <a href="https://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/">dmenu</a> helps me to execute the other software installed. dmenu is very dynamic and easy to be integrated with other scripts and utility. For instance, I use it to select wireless connections, device mounts, integration with the password manager and so forth.</dd> <dt>Shell and Terminal</dt> <dd>I use Zsh as interactive shell. I normally run the shell interpreter within <a href="https://st.suckless.org/">st - simple terminal</a>. I applied some reasonable patches from the <a href="https://st.suckless.org/patches/">Suckless collection</a>, such as scrolling, transparency, background color change on focus, solarized dark theme, boxdraw and so forth. If emacs is already running, I will probably use the integrated terminal, instead of st.</dd> <dt>Email</dt> <dd>I read my emails within emacs throught mu4e, an email client based on <a href="https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/">mu</a>. Its message filter is super powerful, it helps me to find any message really quickly. The account configurations took me time to get it right, but the effort was worth.</dd> <dt>Editor</dt> <dd><a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/">GNU Emacs</a> for any task that goes further than 1 minute. Some features that changed my life are org-mode (org-agenda, org-...), magit, dired, tramp. I found the out-of-the-box experience really inconvinient, the configuration tooks me really a lot of time, but now is tailored to any task I need. For the sake of learning, I still configured emacs personally, I could have gone with an Emacs distribution instead? Now I am trying Emacs Doom for curiosity. For small changes I go for vim. I keep my vim as simple and unpolished as possible, so I can have a similar experience when I occasionally </dd> <dt>Writings</dt> <dd>LaTeX, Libre Office with others</dd> <dt>Browser</dt> <dd>IceCat or Firefox based. I like surf but is so slow</dd> <dt>Passwords</dt> <dd>The standard Unix pass</dd> <dt>RSS reader</dt> <dd>emacs ...</dd> <dt>PDF reader</dt> <dd>zathura, which benefits?</dd> <dt>Screen eye protection</dt> <dd>redshift</dd> </dl> <h2 id="hardware">Hardware</h2> <p>TP T60, libreboot, open WiFi card.</p>