Tools I use

No results.

Computer Hardware and OS operating system

• 13-inch Framework laptop
  • 11th Gen Intel© Core™ i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz × 4
  • 1TB SSD
  • 32GB RAM (probably more than I need)
• Linux Mint 20.3
  • Cinnamon desktop
  • LynX theme
  • macOS keybindings
• WASD 87-key keyboard with Cherry MX brown switches and Mac keycaps

Phone

• Feature phone (a.k.a. dumbphone, flip phone). Can't recommend the one I currently have, so no link. If you want to make the switch, avoid KaiOS. It's absolutely riddled with bugs and performance issues.

Web browser

• Firefox by Mozilla
  • New Tab Override extension so I can set the Web Portal as my homepage.
  • Color scheme (h/t Mark Sandstrom) - I have no idea why they made the default theme so low-contrast.

Computer habitability

• uBlock Origin for Firefox - Wide-spectrum ad, tracker, and content blocker.
  • for Chrome
  • for Edge
• LeechBlock NG for Firefox - Highly configurable site-blocker. Lets you set time limits and redirects. My configuration.
  • for Chrome
  • for Edge

Desktop Apps

• Obsidian - Notetaking / digital gardening app for iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Software development

• JetBrains editors - Expensive, but they come with pretty incredible code intelligence and refactoring tools. Lots of stuff you'd have to configure yourself or use plugins for in other editors "just works" in JetBrains.
• Visual Studio Code - Pretty good out of the box, configurable, versatile, and free.
  • emeraldwalk.RunOnSave extension - Runs a program each time a file is saved. I use it to build the development version of this website.
• GitHub - Hosts Git repositories. Owned by Microsoft.
• GitLab - Hosts Git repositories.

Web Hosting

• Namecheap - Domain registrar
• GitHub Pages - Mostly painless hosting for static sites. Works well with Git, obviously. But it was bizarrely difficult to set up a custom domain; the process is riddled with errors and footguns.
• Neocities - Freemium, indie, social web hosting. A spiritual successor to Geocities. Much easier to add a custom domain to than GitHub Pages. Neocities hosts The Wayward Webring and a mirror of this site.

Programming Languages

• JavaScript
  • NPM - Package repository. Owned by Microsoft. See also the NPM documentation.
• TypeScript - Statically-typed superset of JavaScript. Owned by Microsoft.
• Ruby
  • Rubygems - Package repository.
• Go

My go-to JavaScript tools and libraries

• Bundlephobia - Website where you can viewthe size and composition of NodeJS / JavaScript packages on NPM. Includes comparisons to similar libraries. Useful for keeping your JS bundles small.
• Vite - Fast, easy-to-use dev server for single-page apps. Built-in hot-reloading and TypeScript compilation, among other features.
• @benchristel/taste - Fast, ergonomic, minimalist test framework.
• Bun - blazing fast, but somewhat crash-prone replacement for node and npm that also implements some web APIs (but no DOM). I use Bun to run mdsite and Taste tests.
• Prettier - On many of my older projects, I use Prettier for code formatting.
• ESLint - On my more recent projects, I've been formatting code with ESLint and the @stylistic plugin. It's more flexible than Prettier. Here is an example of how I've configured it. For the reasons why I switched, see Anthony Fu's post "Why I don't use Prettier".
• mdsite - My static site generator.
• Preact - Lightweight reactive UI library. Implements the React API, so you can use third-party React components.
• Husky - Git hooks framework.
• Marked - Markdown-to-HTML converter for NodeJS.
• @regosen/gapless-5 - gapless and looped audio playback on the web. Essential if you're building a music player.
• tiny-invariant - TypeScript assertion library that does type narrowing.

Tools I'm Interested In

I don't currently use these, but I might someday.

Apps

• Taskwarrior - Manages todo lists from the command line.
• The Old Reader - An RSS feed reader modeled after the now-defunct Google Reader.

Software Development

• Deno - see also the documentation
• pnpm - Replaces npm.
• Neutralino - Build lightweight cross-platform desktop apps with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
• daisyUI
• SQLite
• zed - An editor designed for remote pair programming.
• Fly.io - web server hosting
• Gource - visualize Git repo history as an animated graph
• Milkdown - a framework for WYSIWYG/markdown combo editors. Write markdown that converts to rich text as you type. Made by Mirone.
• MDX - A cross between [Markdown] and JSX. Lets you add React components to Markdown documents and render those documents in a React app.
• day.js - a JavaScript library for date/time calculations.
• date-fns - another JavaScript library for date/time calculations.
• superstruct - A TypeScript parser combinator library.

Tools I Have Used and Liked

I like these, and they're still available, but for one reason or another I don't use them anymore.

• Flow - A type system for JavaScript, similar to TypeScript. Flow is, IMO, the superior typechecker in several respects, including correctness and performance, but unfortunately few libraries distribute type declarations for it.
• Goatcounter - Free web analytics that won't let Big Tech spy on your users. Stopped using because I don't get enough traffic to care about analytics.
• Pale Moon - a fork of the Firefox browser, free of bloatware and adware, but with support for many modern web APIs. (And yes, their website circa 2024 was the ultimate inspiration for the design of the portal page!) I switched back to Firefox because I wanted to install extensions that wouldn't work with Pale Moon.