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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>
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