kevin

@kevin@mander.xyz
0 Post – 17 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Yes. The only things I use regularly that aren't aliased to or replaced by a rust-built tool are mkdir, ln, and rsync.

  • cd: zoxide
  • ls: eza
  • cat: bat
  • grep: ripgrep
  • find: fd
  • sed: sd
  • du: dust
  • top/htop: btm
  • vi: helix
  • tmux: zellij (or wezterm mux)
  • diff: delta
  • ps: procs

Probably some others I'm forgetting

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9 times out of 10, what I want is tldr (https://tldr.sh/). There are a bunch of terminal interfaces for it, I use tealdeer.

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Oops, thanks for the heads up! No idea where that came from

Upgrading/tinkering doesn't void your warranty. Explicitly.

And their customer service is top notch. I thought I bricked my gazelle when I upgraded the memory, but their customer service walked me through how to fix it - didn't even bat an eye.

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The man has a way with words and is righteous about giving credit where due.

they either don't improve upon or add functionality that's not available, or simply add eye candy. Gaining pretty colors is nice, but not worth losing familiarity with ubiquitous tools.

The thing I like about a lot of these is that I don't lose familiarity with existing tools. When I end up on a cluster that doesn't have them, I'm a bit annoyed, but I can still operate just fine.

The principle exception to this is actually fd - I now find find (har!) almost unusable without having a man page open in a separate terminal. But that's because fd is so much more ergonomic and powerful, I would never give it up unless forced.

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I did not know that - my point is that system76 is not at all sketchy about it. They actively encourage tinkering, make it clear that you won't void your warranty, and have extensive technical documentation to explain how to do upgrades etc

I've also got a gazelle, nearly 5 years old - no complaints! I occasionally need to use it on battery and it's pretty power hungry, but if you turn off Nvidia graphics for those times, it's quite a bit better.

I really understand this as a starting position, but it can definitely be taken too far. I feel like the details matter a lot.

A few years ago there was a big dust up in the Julia community when they wanted to add a small amount of telemetry to the package servers - basically the plan was to identify real users from things like CI runs, and to be able to identify the number of unique users , which matters a lot, especially for grant writing (and a lot of academics use Julia, so this would be a boon to the ecosystem).

The core devs were super up front about it, offered easy opt-out, and even were receptive to a plan that would switch from unique identifiers for downloaders to some scheme that would give an accurate count without the ability to trace a particular download to a particular user, but a couple of prominent members of the community were incensed.

Wow, reading that left me quite confused until I realized that it's elder scrolls and not Buddhism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalpa_(time)

Your point stands regardless 😅

Normally running a command does execute a binary.

I'm not certain, but I'm wondering if OP means that new programs don't automatically get a "desktop" app or whatever. I'm often annoyed when I have to manually create the file that lets me access software from the launch menu

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You said a bunch of things you like about cinnamon, and nothing that you don't. Is there something motivating you to switch?

What I mean is that many of them have basically the same functionality with the same arguments. I don't mean I have pristine memory for the differences, but things like alias ls="eza" is basically a drop in replacement with some added features. So when I'm on a server without it, everything is basically the same, just less fancy.

Helix and fd are an example of the other pattern - they are huge improvements over existing tools, to the point that when I'm forced to use the basic ones, I'm actively crippled. But as an argument not to use the better tool day-to-day, this doesn't make sense to me. Why would I force myself to suffer 95% of the time to save myself from suffering 5% of the time?

I mean, for helix/vi it's even clearer. Vanilla vi is basically unusable for me anyway, and I needed a huge number of plugins to be serviceable - on a basic cluster environment, I'm going to be crippled anyway, so...

I don't have any particular allegiance to rust, though once it's set up, being able to install through cargo rather than being to figure out whatever package manager or build system is nice, especially on various HPC environments where I don't have sudo.

Btop does look cool though

You are of course welcome to your opinion. Use whatever tools bring you joy. But I'm a huge fan of helix, and think zellij is great (though I prefer wezterm's mux server when I can use it).

That's basically how I use desktop files generally, the kde launch menu (similar to the old Windows "start"... I don't know what it's called) comes up when I tap super, and then I can start typing and find what I want to launch.

You can set that up to run custom scripts, but all desktop files are there by default.

OpenSUSE for pried from my hands because the college I work for set up a Cisco proxy server / 2FA that I couldn't get to work with openconnect, and Cisco's AnyConnect won't run on it.

After a few weeks on Rocky, I am desperate to go back.