I am also a Sublime Text user. I am a little bothered by the fact that it’s not free, but nothing else feels as comfortable, and I’m not sure why. Maybe I’ll change in the future, not sure.
I’m a Linux Mint user, so most of the other stuff I use is free and open source, wherever possible.
I’ve also been learning how to use ImageMagick lately, and OMG it’s an amazing tool! I’ve never used it via a gui, just through the command line and it saves so much time!
Notepad - not ++, just Notepad. It’s what I used back in the day so I’m used to it. Although my son teases me that using it is like creating sand mandalas one grain at a time.
Pixilart.com - I use this for making my pixel art. I’ve played around with GNU Image Manipulation but it seems like way too much for my purposes. I’ve looked at Aesprite but I don’t feel like I create enough consistently to buy a program when the editor on Pixilart fills the bill.
Other tools I use that I find helpful for non-webmaking purposes:
Mobileread forums - old school message forum that’s been in existence forever all about e-readers, e-books, e-book software, e-book formats.
Bitwarden - password manager. I used to keep all my passwords in a Word document. Unencrypted. And most of the passwords were as close to a certain 6 letter word as I could get - you know, so I didn’t have to remember a million passwords. I am trying to become better with password security so now I let BitWarden make and store my passwords and I only have to remember how to get into the program.
i was spurred by this post to find an alternative to rainmeter on alternativeto.net, and the one that seems to be the best and leanest is a small open-source app called Sidebar Diagnostics. it’s not quite as flexible as rainmeter but it gives you cpu and memory and hdd info at a glance and it uses up less cpu than rm i think!
do you have any rainmeter alternatives? I really like rainmeter for keeping track of my computer temp and memory/storage usage but I’ve also noticed the CPU drain :(
I use CoreTemp for temperature, and WizTree for storage with Task Manager for memory. Def wanna check out Sidebar Diagnostics now tho!
I use Windows 10 on my laptop and EndeavourOS XFCE on my under-powered, office-grade PC. Both have pros and cons, of course.
Web-dev
My website is statically generated via Zola. I wrote my custom theme by taking inspiration from the documentation and other prefab styles. I used this website to use an image as a starting point to choose the colours (for the dark theme).
To edit files, I use either Lite XL, VSCodium or Notepad++.
I use a modified openring to include titles and summaries from other blogs I read.
Music
Unfortunately, my favourite music player gmusicbrowser has been broken for some months, so I’m using Strawberry. On Windows, I use MusicBee instead.
To get my music, I make use of both my Spotify and Deezer premium subscriptions, and yt-dlp covers all other cases (and it plays nicely with MPV!).
To manipulate audio, I use Reaper (or Ableton Live, if I have to add original music to it). Recently, I picked up Bespoke to make silly and over-simplistic EDM loops to (not really) study to.
To compensate for volume changes in live streams, I use EasyEffects.
Office
My main writing board is Obsidian with Zettlekasten mode (no 3rd-party plugins). In order to do what I need, this is more than fine. I sync my vault among my devices via Syncthing.
I write everything serious in TeX on TeXstudio. To achieve some insane computations, I use Wolfram Mathematica or some poorly-crafted Python scripts.
For generic office files, I use LibreOffice. For reading PDFs, I use either Atril or Okular. Books are dealt with in Calibre.
I use rclone as a backup tool.
I just updated my resources page to include a /uses!
Come look, I’m pretty proud of it; has my specs/devices as well as my recommendations for helpful Neocities tools :]
VSCodium for coding, sometimes SublimeText for quick edits
iTerm 2 for terminal with zsh and zsh-autosuggestions plugin
Hugo and 11ty for my websites
Cyberduck for infrequent SFTP
GitHub and a self-hosted instance of Gitea for mirroring important repos
Obsidian for note taking
NetNewsWire for RSS feeds
Neocities for hosting
OMG.lol for link pages, pastebin, status updates, and other fun things
SoundCloud and BeatPort for DJ sets, or yt-dlp if I really want a particular song
PeerTube for a mirror of my YouTube videos
Canva Pro (shared with friends) for most graphics
Pixelmator Pro for image editing on Mac (Affinity Photo on PC sometimes)
Unsplash/Vecteezy/Pexels for free images
VLC for watching video
DaVinchi Resolve and iMovie for movie edits
OBS Project for live streams
Synology NAS for backups, Drive, and Photos Semi-related post - App Defaults
Website:
My site is hosted on neocities, & I mostly code live in their editor
I used to use CodePen for writing code, but I wanted an offline, free alternative. I started using VSCodium last year (on the advice of a 32-bit Café user! Thank you!) for bigger projects & it’s been alright so far, although I miss the immediacy of CodePen. I am an amateur so websites like W3S are very helpful to me.
Digital Hobbies:
While I don’t use many graphics or images on my website, I do make images for zines, posters & social media. For image editing I use Glimpse (which has apparently shut down…oops).
The main thing I use that this worth mentioning is Dokku which I can’t recommend enough. It’s basically an open source alternative to Heroku. If you can Dockerize your app and install Dokku on a VPS, you can pretty easily deploy your backend apps to it with git. Probably the best thing about it is that it handles all the tedious stuff for you, like updating SSL certs, and then there is also zero downtime deployments. The other thing I like about it is that you can deploy different apps to different subdomains easily.
It seems like a lot to learn at first, and like its maybe one of those cases where you have a thin wrapper around a more fundamental thing that its probably better to learn instead, and maybe that’s true, but once you’ve learned the thing (configuring nginx), it’s nice to not have to do it again.
What helps you the most with building your website?
I mainly use the Hugo static site generator so I can focus more on the content and building templates than troubleshooting each page. A real life saver.
For all the code stuff I either use Kate or VSCodium. I do most of my markdown editing in one of these two applications.
Like most people nowadays I use git for version control. I used to self-host my own gitea instance, but have been throwing everything on github because it has the most industry support for integrations and it is easier to teach people git when I’m using the same tools as they are.
What are you using to maintain your servers?
I’ve been using Netlify for hosting so my server is maintained for me, but I’ve been wanting to get off there platform and to a more small web friendly solution. Any recommendations?
For my home server I use TrueNAS Core with some BSD jails for some applications and a Ubuntu VM for docker containers. I mainly use it as a NAS and for hosting my NextCloud instance.
What independent software do you use for your digital hobbies?
For OS I use EndeavourOS. Think Arch, but with a graphical installer and a friendly community.
I use Kdenlive for video editing. It is powerful, mostly stable, and open source. I’ve also used Adobe Premier Pro and Cyberlink PowerDirector before, but both are proprietary, buggy, and slow.
For photo management I use digiKam. For general image editing I use GIMP and I recently been learning a small bit of ImageMagick for things like optimizing images.
For note taking I used to use Logseq, but have moved back to using a fountain pen and several notebooks. I’ll probably digitize them back into Logseq one day.
I also have a /uses page on my website listing out more stuff.
