Some Possibly Interesting New Finds (For Me)

• Several Programming Tools 

  I am not a programmer, even though I play around with code a little bit, from time to time, and some of my main tools involve writing code (gri).  BUT some of the best tools for my money (usually no money at all) have often turned out to be hacker level tools.  This leads to some problems.  But here's the deal: I learned enough computer science to be dangerous to myself, and, of course, to make myself useful TO MYSELF.  I took an electronic engineering course in summer school in 1982: Computer Architechture.  That was an amazing course.  We did some trivial programming in Assembly Language and learned the basics of what a computer it, on the hardware level.  I also took a Math course, for fun: Fortran.  The young Graduate STudent who taught the computer architecture course said this to me: you now understand what computers can do, and can make yourself useful in your work.  This is true. 
  
  In about 1986 I had been collecting notes on animal names in several dialects in the E. Caroline Islands, Chuuk and nearby.  I desired to develop a digital database of some kind, and even while working on an island with very rudimentary infrastructure and other resources, I was able to get started thank you to my Mother, who knew about this project and funded a Laptop for my work.  I was working for 11,000 to 14,000 a year, in 1987 dollars.  I learned about the Free Software Foundation through Info World.  Don't ask my why: it was free, I guess.  I had a subscription, and read it from cover to cover.  That was in the halcyon days of snail mail, when letters could take weeks from the US. 
  
  I needed a programmer's editor.  This is the first tool I needed, for two reasons: programmer's editors, unlike word processors, did not insert obscure and hidden codes in the files.  They produced ASCII files, where, in a very primitive sense, What You See is What You Get.   So those proprietary behemoths would not do.  But neither did I have the funds or the inside knowledge of what kind of program I needed.  A Linguist at the University of Hawaii, Robert Hsu, sent a demo disk for an editor, and it worked well.  It was MultiEdit, and it would have cost 300.00 to get a full on copy of the program.  That was more than half of my bi-weekly take home pay!  I needed the facility to enter simple diacritics over vowels.  (Even today, in 2017, it is not trivial to do so in this browser, and I won't try).   As nice as that program seemed, to get the manual to learn how to do this would require the purchase of a license. 
  
  In InfoWorld on week, about 6 or 8 pages in, was a small article about the Free Software Foundation.  Knowing nothing about their work, seeing the name nevertheless conjured up visions: was it possible that I could get a programmer's editor, of some description, from the FSF?  I wrote a letter. 
  
  Some time later, I received a small box with, IIRC, 13 disks, those 3-1/2" disks in plastic that were used in that time, with software of various kinds from the Free Software Foundation, developed by the GNU Project.  This insignificant looking little package was life-changing for me.  And, even today, I still am confounded when I realize that the Free Software Foundation gave me for free the tools to do what I needed to do, without so much as a request for a donation.  The "learning curve" was substantial.  But every thing I needed to do was possible with these tools, and the subsequent tools that were available as Free Software. 
  
  Notice I did not say Open Source Software.  That idea came later.  To be sure, Free Software source code is open.  Right now is not the time to reiterate the details or history of the Free Software Movement: for that, please follow this link for a bit of history about the GNU Computing System.
  
  The software in that box many programs that were especially compiled for the Windows Operating System.  The most important was Emacs.  I use Emacs to this day.  Also included were a number of utilities for manipulating text files.  I was thrilled!   A superior sort program for sorting my data; the program gptx, grep, find: all of these were crucially useful.  And these are but a few. 
  
  Over the months and years to come I relied upon this software to generate the data files.  Through the suggestion of Robert Hsu and other linguists from UH, I learned of the Band Format to generate free form data bases.  Over time, I came to use TeX and LaTeX to generate publishable output.  These were and are ALL Free Software: Free as in Liberty, in that I can use them without violating any copyright or patents; and usually Free in terms of money as well.  My work was truly enabled by this gift from the Free Software Foundation.
  
  From the start, these tools were not easy to use, but unlike almost all proprietary software I have used, I could use the full horsepower, not some limited powers as dumbed down by the developers. 
  
  I started receiving the GNUS Bull, a periodical newsletter from the FSF.  This was early on.  At some point, perhaps in 1992 or 1993, the GNUS Bull printed an article about free UNIX-like operating systems: FreeBSD and Linux.  Some time after, I travelled to Guam for medical reasons.  While I was there, I made arrangements to download several disks for the Slackware Linux distribution.  This was the beginning of a long dependence upon Free Software.
  
  Immediately, my computer was faster.  Multitasking was a real process, not a faux multitasking as on Windows 3.0. or 3.1, where multiple tasks could be queued up, but only one at a time could use the CPU.  
  
  Over the years I have tried to explain my preference and  reliance on Free Software to my friends and associates.   I am saddened looking back, to realize that few if any of my friends took this seriously.   I am saddened that I have not been able to share the tools that changed my life.   Often I have been met with derision, as the butt ofa  joke, for not being more open minded to the expensive software tools that often were provided by the schools I worked for.  Software companies worked very hard to engage schools with their proprietary systems.  It was a matter of prestige for School Districts in Micronesia, where money was scarce, and millions of dollars could have been saved... 
  
  The tools are much better, from my perspective.  Perhaps I failed in not teaching computer literacy or computer science.  I did engage a numbe rof students, like one on Saipan, who learned to install Linux on some out of date systems we were able to scrounge, or on new computers we built to showcase the concept of saving money through use of Free Software. 
  
  So my toolkit includes less glamorous programs than those of many of my colleagues and friends.  But as time has progressed, some of the great Free programs have come into greater use. 
  
  I now want to mention a few more recen ttools that I have found useful.  These tools are not mainstream advance wave programs.  Their utility is great, in many ways exceeding the facility of fancier GUI tools. 
  

  Ranger

  Purportedly a vim-based file manager, this text based utility is extremely useful.  Potentially: IF I can sort the wheat from the chaff.  Today, I managed to delete many files in one fell swoop by not understanding the usage.  I don't know whether this was my fault.  The good side: I don't even remember what files I lost: good, because I don't have to worry about it.

  Silver Searcher 

  A grep replacement I think that works better than almost anything else I've found to search my extensive org-mode main folder.  

  Ripgrep

  I think an even better silver searcher than Ag. 

  
  

  i3 Tiling Window Manager

  This is the first tiling WM that I have been able to get my head 1/2 way around.  The bad part is I haven't yet understood what it is I cannot do.  

  
  

  XFCE4

  My goto Window Manager when other experiments lead down rabbitholes or blind alleys.  GNOME 3 is extremely interesting except for that it is, for me, almost unuseable.  That's bizaare.  Issues:

  I need a menu.

  Why the heck do I need to push the mouse to the upper left edge of the display to make the desktop switcher images appear on the right?!