Welcome to Can of Worms

When it comes right down to it, I am just a casual Linux user. I don’t use it for my job. I do write some small applications, but I am not a big developer. My main purpose is to just use my computer to run a few applications to do basic tasks such as manage my finances, browse the internet, write some articles, etc. So, the actual Linux distribution doesn’t really matter. ...

Thoughts on Switching to Linux Lot’s of articles and videos on the web advise you to switch to Linux from Windows. Here are a few things that are often not clear about the advice. Why Are There So Many Linux Choices? Linux is not a one size fits all operating system. It fills many different quite specific needs. Here are just a few examples: Desktop / Laptop computing: This is what most articles encouraging switching are talking about, getting you to give Linux a try on your local computer. Servers: Linux runs web servers, database servers, file servers, and so on. This accounts for most Linux installations. They reliably run behind the scenes delivering web pages and data. Embedded systems: Many small devices are actually running Linux under the hood. Since the operating system can be pared down to essentials, it can be the perfect lightweight way to run routers, smart devices, and so on. In fact, when I turned on my blue ray player for the first time, it booted up into Linux. Gaming consoles such as the Steam Deck run Linux as their operating system. Specialty systems line scientific computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, security systems and much more utilize Linux. There are distributions that cater to people familiar with Windows or with Mac. If this is your first go, that could influence your decision. Don’t get overwhelmed by the huge number of distributions. Do your research and try out a few that sound interesting. Most are able to boot up from a USB stick. So, you can play around with them without actually installing them. ...

Helix Cheat Sheet I am developing master of the Helix text editor. This document is notes relating to wrapping my head around some major paradigm shifts in learning a unique editor and in no way replaces the Helix documentation. With vim-like-editors, there are so many ways to do things, it is overwhelming. Be prepared to dedicate some time to get to know the editor. Start with the basic movement commands so you can at least move around. Then as you encounter situations where you think, “It would be nice if…”, there is probably a way to do it. Stop and add that new set of keystrokes to your arsenal. There are four primary editor modes in helix: command, normal, insert, and select. The mode is indicated in the lower left of the statusline at the bottom of the screen. The modes you see are: “INS”: insert mode; “SEL”: select mode; “NOR”: normal mode. Command mode doesn’t have a status indicator since these commands are executed directly. ...

Gruvbox Color Theme Gruvbox is my favorite color theme. It is a dark color scheme that is easy on the eyes and provides a comfortable reading experience. It is a great choice for working in the terminal, and it is good for long editing sessions. Its popularity means that it is widely available for many applications. I use the graphics below as a guide when tweaking the color themes in some of my command line applications to be a closer / better match for the Gruvbox theme. ...

Doing some thinking about personal data and where it is stored, especially since starting my CLI productivity tools exploration. This is the kind of thing companies take very seriously and you should too. It’s important to keep control of your own data and to store it in such a way as to have it still available and viable many years in the future. I have lost data because software vendors change file formats and don’t maintain backward compatibility. I have lost data for unknown reasons when storing files in the cloud. I have not had any catastrophic hard drive failures, but that’s no reason not to have good backups. ...

Are you a senior citizen that has difficulties with transportation? I’ve been looking into that question for Spartanburg, South Carolina and it turns out, there are a number of options. Most of these services will require scheduling pick up and drop off. In order to use them effectively will require planning your trips ahead of time. So, there is a very good probability that there is something similar in your area. ...

To set up language support for helix, there are two things that need to be done. First, you will need to install the LSP language server for your desired language. Second, configure the language server in the languages.toml file. The language file is stored in ~/.config/helix/languages.toml Along the way, I started getting a TOML warning in languages.toml that my file was not set up correctly. In the end, moving all the [[languages]] sections above all the [language-server] items cleared up the issue. ...

This article is one of the vault series of articles about productivity application using the terminal. Note: See the parent document: Using the Terminal as a Daily Driver for more about terminal productivity applications. I don’t know whether an EPUB reader counts as a productivity tool. But, I ran across these and they work for reading .epub files. Since I use Calibre as an ebook library manager, it is able to convert files into the .epub format. ...

Just happened to check on Helix to see whether there was any news about an update. To my pleasant surprise, version 25.07 was out. News Release Notes Change Log Source Code Releases Page Trying out the .deb installation package instead of the AppImage this time. Now off to explore the enhancements and improvements.

A newsreader or RSS reader is an application that allows you to read “feeds” from various websites. This can really help you stop blindly surfing the web, yet catch up on the latest articles from sites you care about. Note: See the parent document: Using the Terminal as a Daily Driver for more about terminal productivity applications. Newsboat I’m going with newsboat for this category. Newsboat Documentation Installation When looking at the install options, it did not look pretty. From their documentation page, snap packages were mentioned, but I don’t use those with my Linux distro. Newsboat is also not available in my package manager. Their next suggestions was download and compile from source code. That would be a real pain, so wasn’t interested in that. ...