Raúl E. Taveras's Website

Software I use

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Table of Contents

Software I use

I keep this page mostly as a reference to myself, but I publish it in case anyone finds it useful. I’d be happy to write about my experiences or workflows with these tools if anyone wants me to.

Linux

I am running openSuse Tumbleweed using the KDE Plasma Desktop Environment. I’m testing between X11 and Wayland.

General1

  • Konsole: Terminal emulator by KDE2.
  • Nushell: cross-platform shell (works on Windows!) where structured data is first-class.
  • Obsidian: markdown text editor and ecosystem.
  • Neovim (based on MINIMAX): modal and very extensible text editor for the terminal.
  • Espanso: open-source text expander. Incredibly useful for repeated text and for symbols not easy to type, like the em dash (—). Note its Wayland support is in development.
  • zoxide: an upgrade to cd (change directory) that keeps track of the frequency of your visits to directories and lets you change to them with fuzzy finding.
  • less: Unix’s terminal pager par excellence.
  • bat: I mostly use it instead of less since it uses less in the background but colorizes the output.
  • Typst: a modern typesetting system. While still in pre-1.0.0 development, it is simpler and ultimately more powerful than LaTeX.
  • Zellij: I didn’t get it until I used it, then I did. Just try it. It will click.
1

You may notice I haven’t listed office suite software. I don’t use office suites in my personal purposes. Where I would use a word processor, I use markdown or typst when I need more power. Instead of spreadsheets, I use hledger or nushell + json or yaml, and I basically never need to present slideshows anymore.

2

I’m interested in Wezterm, but I’m done tinkering as of the date of this draft.

Internet

  • Zen Browser — flatpak version. What Arc Browser should have been.
  • See below for some online services I use.

File management

  • Dolphin: KDE Plasma’s default GUI file manager.
  • 7zip: maybe the best compression tool in the market.
  • Calibre: ebook library manager, but words can’t do it justice.
  • Yazi: excellent terminal file manager.
  • jj (or jujutsu): simple but powerful version control system that builds on, and is compatible with, Git.
  • lazygit: terminal user interface (TUI) for Git, for the few occasions when I’m in a Git repository that isn’t also a jj repository.
  • restic: incremental back up utility with built-in encryption.

Admin

  • ZSA Keymapp + Custom QMK repo: for flashing firmware onto my Ergodox EZ and ZSA Voyager keyboards.
  • Impression: Tool for creating bootable USB drives from .iso files.
  • GParted: The age-old disk partition utility.
  • Fastfetch: Utility to display system info to the terminal.
  • ssh: For connecting to my home server.
  • tldr: Cheatsheet repository for command line utilities.

Gaming

  • Steam.
  • Lutris: Manager for game installation and execution. Excellent for running Windows games through Proton.
  • Battle.net.

Media

  • Okular: PDF reader by KDE. Also available for Windows! Bonus: can render Markdown and epub.
  • VLC: Formerly known as the video player par excellence, it’s still fantastic, and came preinstalled with openSUSE.

Language servers (LSP) and formatters

Other

  • Brassica Sound Changer: My favourite sound change applier for my constructed languages.
  • Hledger: command line utility for accounting using just plain text files.
  • Starship: customizable, cross-shell terminal prompt.

Windows

Since I switched to Linux, and this page is for software I currently used, I have greatly reduced it to what I kept installed in my small Windows partition.

General

  • Flow Launcher (with Everything search): Launcher for Windows. My first or second install every single time. It makes the start menu basically obsolete.
  • Stardock Start11: Excellent taskbar and start menu customization. (Paid)
  • Neovim (see Linux section)
  • Microsoft Powertoys: An amazing set of tools. If you’re anything above a completely basic user, you should look into this. It will likely significantly improve your quality of life while using your PC.
  • Windows Terminal: Generally very good and customizable terminal emulator.

Internet

File management

  • Directory Opus 13: One of, if not the, most powerful file managers on Windows. (Paid)
  • 7zip
  • Teracopy: Utility that improves moving and copying. It’s much, much, much faster than Windows Explorer, and it’s also safer since it implements file integrity validation.
  • Yazi

Admin

  • Geek Uninstaller: Very powerful and portable uninstaller utility. I don’t keep this installed; rather I keep it on a USB flash drive.
  • Treesize Free: Disk usage analyzer; lets you see how much storage is used by each directory and file, recursively.
  • Xmouse button control: Utility to customize how mouse inputs get interpreted. I use it whenever I’m not using a Razer mouse.
  • CPUID CPU-Z: Display information about your hardware. Particularly useful since it includes info otherwise scattered.
  • WinaeroTweaker: Powerful tool to turn Windows features on and off and customize Windows.
  • ZSA Keymapp + Custom QMK repo: for flashing firmware onto my Ergodox EZ and ZSA Voyager keyboards.
  • Razer Synapse: Powerful software to customize Razer hardware; in my case, it’s just the mouse.
  • BleachBit: A very powerful disk cleaning utility.

Media

Online services

  • Proton suite: Proton AG is a Swiss technology company that offers services focused on (and known for) privacy through encryption and relatively low data collection, particularly when compared with the Google and Microsoft services it competes with.
    • Proton Mail: My main email provider. I especially like it integrates with Proton Pass to provide hide-my-email aliases.
    • Proton Drive: Cloud file storage, like Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive.
    • Proton Pass: Password manager.
    • Proton Calendar: A cloud calendar manager. I don’t particularly need its features or its (limited) integration with other Proton services, but I also don’t need something particularly powerful, so might as well.
    • Proton VPN: Among VPNs, designed to be particularly private. I no longer use it too much.
  • YouTube Premium / Music: this is my music streamer of choice. If you’re using Spotify, you’re really missing out on sound quality. You think you don’t have a good enough ear to tell the difference? Think again.
  • Raindrop.io: cloud bookmark manager. I feel I underuse this.
  • GitHub: Probably the most popular Git forge.
  • [Inoreader]: Cloud RSS aggregator and reader.
  • [Zotero]: Open-source bibliography / reference manager with proprietary cloud sync.
  • Tailscale: Black magic VPN-like thing. I use it to connect to my home server outside of home.

iOS / iPadOS

I’ll skip the tools that merely enable compatibility with services I use elsewhere too.

  • Safari: Pretty good browser. We don’t need to talk about how Apple kneecaps all other browsers.
  • Apple Photos: I don’t need anything fancier.
  • Google Maps.
  • Apple Voice Memos.
  • La Terminal: SSH client terminal. I use it to connect to my home server.
  • Project Indigo: From the guys behind the Google Pixel camera, apparently best in class image processing to take full advantage of the phone’s capabilities. It’s definitely wasted on me, but I’ll take what I can get.
  • GuitarTuna: Guitar tuner.
  • Bass Tuner B1: Bass guitar tuner.
  • BookPlayer: Audiobook player.
  • YouVersion Bible: Extremely feature- and Bible-packed Bible app.
  • Noteful: My favourite Apple Pencil note-taking app. It’s essentially a PDF annotator.
  • PDF Viewer: Very feature-packed PDF reader.
  • Day by Day by Forward Movement: App version of (a lot of) the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, with surprising number of features, including Spanish versions of the Daily Office and recordings of the English version.
  • Adguard: Good ad blocker. Used to be the best; don’t know if that’s true anymore.
  • QuickScan: Maybe the best phone scanner app? It can also automatically export to paperless-ngx.
  • Pocket Casts: Though I miss Android’s Podcast Addict, this does the job fine.
  • Procreate: It is exactly as good as everyone says, and even me, a very much not artistic person, can use it. (Paid)
  • Uber
  • Typewise Keyboard: Hexagonal keyboard with much better autocorrect than the built-in iOS one. (Paid)
  • CubeTime: For timing Rubik’s cube solves.
  • Pleco: The uncontested best Chinese dictionary app, both Mandarin and Cantonese.

Home server

I self-host a few services for privacy or just convenience. It runs on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Since I am bad at networking, I aim to touch it as little as possible.

  • Gitea: a git forge. I use it in addition to, not instead of, GitHub, for my most sensitive repositories.
  • Copyparty: a file server.
  • Calibre-web-automated: a service to access my Calibre library stored on my home server.
  • Vim. I can’t bother with porting my complete neovim config, so this is good enough.
  • While I no longer host them, I experimented with paperless-ngx and Adguard Home. I 100% recommend them and would use them again, but my family aren’t very big fans…