below are some pieces of software that just made my life better.

i3 window manager

back in college, i used wsl2 (another great piece of software if you are on windows) constantly to get stuff done, and eventually, linux took over. then came the inevitable: distro hopping. i went from gnome to xfce to some obscure one, but none of them really clicked. i couldn’t find a reason to stick to one until i discovered i3.

i3 is ridiculously lightweight and fast, doesn’t care about fancy aesthetics (god i hate animations), and lets you configure everything in a single file. but the most important, it’s keyboard first. muscle memory takes me to the exact workspace i want. it opens the exact app i want, in the exact spot i want. every time.

did i mention i hate animations? i remember a time when i had to use macos at work for a couple of years, swiping from space to space to find the window i needed, hundreds of times a day and you can’t turn off that animation. what!?

i’m never going back.

syncthing

ever since i ditched the iphone and mac setup (after exactly one year), syncing files between my computer and phone has been a chore. sharing picture from my phone to computer involved uploading it to drive, then downloading it to my computer. sounds simple, but add notes, ebooks, audiobooks, and music files, and it quickly became a headache. overwriting the wrong files, double-checking if they were the latest version, syncing todo lists. i’m tired.

it might sound like one of those infomercials, but then i found syncthing. it’s peer-to-peer file sync software, that changed my life. i’ve got a folder called shared on both my computer and phone, and anything i toss in there syncs immediately. no conflicts, extremely fast, like my own local cloud.

i also wrote a script that shows the sync status in my top bar, so i know at a glance how much data is in there. you should check out my dotfiles.

firefox sync and bookmarks

i’m sure this isn’t just a firefox thing; chrome likely does it too. but until recently, i never cared much about bookmarks. i thought, “if it’s on the internet, i’ll find it again.” now that i’m reading and doing more, though, i run into tons of stuff i want to revisit. a plain list of links isn’t structured, so future me has no shot at remembering why i saved them in the first place.

right now i have hundreds of links, grouped and nested three levels deep, all synced to my phone. thanks to good old fox.

stow

it’s funny-most of my problems revolve around syncing files and moving data to another place, time, or device.

on linux, almost every app throws in a dotfile somewhere in your home directory, which is usually portable. you can get things back just the way they were: every shortcut and detail.

i used to manually copy these files to github for safekeeping. that was a pain. stow handles this by symlinking configs into my dotfiles dir. i can tweak settings all i want right there, then git status shows me exactly what changed so i can commit and push in one go. relief.

honorable mentions