Tools I Use for Undergrad

I am a big advocate for technological freedom and try to stay as far away from technology as I can. For Zoomers, the biggest measure for ones intelligence is how often you use your phone. Many of the tools I use follow this model of digital minimalism. I also try stay FSF-compatible but I also understand that sometimes proprietary is just better. In that sense I am more ideologically aligned with the Debian Social Contract.


Laptop

I use a thinkpad x230 that has been librebooted. Thinkpads have long been the 'just works' laptop and are great of those who want to escape into a completely FSF-compatible pc.

Text Editor

Vim is the only editor I can use nowadays. It's more of a lifestyle than a text editor, and my fingers can't handle anything else. The commands take up 20% of all the information in my brain.

Operating System

Debian has been my home for the past 2 years. I used to use Arch and Gentoo for a bit but I don't like their package management systems. This is not to say that Debian is any better. It has things I like such as the social contract and the preservation of the orginal packages they hold in their main repos but these are preferences. As long as you are using a free/open source operating system it does not matter what you are using.

File Manager

Ranger is a curses file manager that uses vim-like keybindings. It has been a great addition to more workflow. I have also been known to use lf, although I find it not to be feature rich enough to contain me.

Browser

The internet's existed for quite awhile and not a single good browser has been made yet. Currently I'm using Firefox but I have dabbled with Qutebrowser because of its vim-like keybindings. Anything is fine as long as it's not Chrome.

X11 Stuff

I am using Suckless tools (dwm, st, dmenu, sent, slstatus, etc) for most of everthing else. They are very minimal and exist soley to be used by an elitest crowd. For me this is perfect because it allows me to craft computers that do not have alot of distractions on them.