What tools do you use?

Technology
21

Some great suggestions in here!

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.

Graphics:

Webmastering:

  • Sublime Text
  • FileZilla
  • I’ve been with Dreamhost and I’ve been very happy with their hosting and VPS services. I’ve got all of my sites and some email through there.

Surfing

  • I’m a Firefox user, but Midori has been growing on me lately because it’s so much faster.
  • For office docs and the like, I’m using NextCloud hosted via PikaPods.
  • Currently I’m using FraidyCat for RSS, but I’m thinking about moving to a NextCloud plugin.

Other fun stuff

  • Moon+Reader Pro for reading on Android
  • PowerAmp Pro for listening to my music files
  • On PC, I use Rhythmbox, which is included in Linux Mint by default. It’s pretty full-featured, though, and does everything I want it to.
  • Calibre for managing eBooks.
  • KeePass for passwords, which I have synced to cloud storage. It’s a lifesaver.
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22

For working on my website I use:

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.

IrfanView - for resizing photos I use on my site

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:

ColorNote - note taking app for my Android phone

Feedly - my RSS feed of choice

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.

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23

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!

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24

Oh shit thank you so much, inbtwn!! That looks perfect and I think I’ll download it ^^

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25

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!

EDIT: My Nintendo DS Kustom theme is from here!

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26

Operating system

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.

27

Everything I use I’ve documented on my /uses page. Take a look!

28

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 :]

https://y2kstardust.neocities.org/resources

29

This reminds me that I need to make a /uses page!

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

30

i use vscode and notepad++ for editing and jekyll for building this site

lazy to write the rest so have the /uses page

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31

iTerm 2 is the one software I miss from macOS, it has literally every terminal feature I could ever want.

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32

I use GIMP mostly, since my website is all art.

I use the Neocities editor for html and occasionally Codepen if Im also fiddling with CSS, but I could use Notepad++ if I wanted to :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Website:
My site is hosted on neocities, & I mostly code live in their editor :face_in_clouds:
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).

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What helps you the most with building your website?

  1. A code editor that doesn’t get in my way (currently Notepad++ on desktop and Acode on mobile)
  2. A prose editor that supports Markdown (currently Ghostwriter on desktop and Markor on mobile)
  3. A notetaking app (currently the combination of Memos and Nextcloud Notes)
  4. A task management app to keep track of blog tasks (currently Nextcloud Tasks)
  5. An Internet browser to preview my website and looks up MDN Web Docs (Firefox)
  6. Git to save and track my edits
  7. A file sync tool to keep the same versions of my files across devices (currently Nextcloud)

What are you using to maintain your servers?

My website is hosted on omg.lol, so server maintenance is the admin’s problem /jk

For some of the services I self-host, I use Pikapods.

What independent software do you use for your digital hobbies?

  • Calibre for organizing my non-fiction books and fanfiction
  • Aseprite for pixel art
35

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.

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36

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.

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37

Just remembered one I forgot to write about, and it doesn’t seem this class of tool has been mentioned in this thread yet: Espanso

"Tired of typing the same sentences over and over? (But, ofc, also great for code!) Discover the incredible power of a full-blown text expander."

Cross-platform (Linux, macOS, Windows) & Open-Source!

Consider checking it out / giving it a try!

38

(it seems i come late, but i will participate anyway)

I edit my website mostly using VSCodium, which is a FOSS distribution of VS Code.
I edit all the code, which is mostly PHP/HTML, by hand.
I upload the edited files over SFTP (FTP over SSH) using the FileZilla client software.
The server is somewhere in Niedersachsen… I’m just paying for a website and e-mail combo plan thing.

For note taking, I use GNU Emacs (Doom Emacs) with Org mode – I used Obsidian before, but I found Org to be a better markup format.
I have them structured in categories, inspired by how many Obsidian people do it, but combining a lot of different systems into one (dated journal, diary, private microblog (short thought notes), devlogs, wiki (2 of them), commonplace book, zettelkasten-like thing, etc.).
It’s far from perfect, I already changed the whole system twice since I started it one year ago (2024-10-15).
(I actually wrote this very comment in Emacs before copying it over)
Oh and I recently created a CLI tool that I use to export everything to HTML, create entries from templates, get all note tags and some other stuff…
(I could talk about my note system all day long, I really have to write a blog post about it… I use it for everything!)

For artwork, if I don’t draw on paper, I use Krita or Pinta (sometimes Aseprite) and also Inkscape.

As a music player(s), I use both Elisa and Strawberry, I switch between them all the time (also used Qmmp (Winamp clone) previously).
I download all my music from YouTube, then convert them to M4A (using FFmpeg) and add metadata and album cover images (if possible).

Thunderbird is my Email client and RSS reader of choice.

I have a file storage server that’s just a regular Linux server that I access using SSH and sync to/from using rsync.

39

i too am joining late

for my website i use vscode and winscp. i host it on nearlyfreespeech.

for art ive been using paint tool SAI 2 for about as long as ive been doing digital art… though ive been considering looking for a different program with more brushes

i rip cds to wav with exact audio copy, then convert them to mp3 with freac (i could convert them while ripping with exact audio copy but i didnt wanna add more things to my poor old suffering laptop lol), edit metadata with mp3tag and then put them in my beautiful brand new fiio echo mini. i use makemkv to rip dvds and i play videos in vlc on my computer

i use davinci resolve for video editing but im not really using it to its full potential yet cause its definitely a learning curve compared to capcut (the enshitification got too bad so i switched even tho i loved how simple capcut was lol)

40

I code using Sublime Text 4 with the Monokai Pro color scheme. Other things that are open while I code are Codekit and a few browsers (I do dev work in Firefox and I also usually have Safari open)

For git related stuff I use the Github app, to connect directly to servers I use Transmit.

My servers are all Hetzner VPS and are all managed using Runcloud. Domains all live on Hover. Personal and work mail is provided by Google Workspace.

For design I use both Figma and Sketch. To do lists and everything related to writing is done with iA Writer

Timemator is open for time tracking.

In terms of web software I build everything either as static sites or I use Kirby.

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