Interesting Tools

Exa 

Found on https://the.exa.website

I recently stumbled upon exa, a superior (IMHO) ls workalike.  Exa is found on it's own web page.  I installed it from the community repo on my Archlinux machine. It's a pretty amazing take, not only colorized but with some excellent features as well.   I have found it a pleasant alternative.  My bash aliases:

alias lsl='ls -lrt --color=auto'
alias lsla='ls -lrta --color=auto'
alias le='exa'
alias lel='exa --long'
alias lela='exa --long --all'
alias let='exa --tree'
 

On the exa web site is found comprehensive documentation of the numerous options.

UPDATE (July3, 2024): Eza is a community fork of Exa.  I will use that now. 

Kitty :: "the fast, featureful, GPU-based terminal emulator"

Found on https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

The git repo is at https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty

Of late, I have struggled with terminal emulators.  The well known xrvxt was difficult---for me---to set up.  On my archlinux and manjaro boxes, kitty has great colors, and it is simple.  I am intrigued with the "gpu based" part of the description.  I am uncertain how much advantage is derived from being gpu-based, or whether I need to take special steps to compile it with support for my gpu.   For now, it seems quick.  I have little need at this point for extra features.   The developer of kitty, Kovid Goyal,  has produced some other intriguing pieces, including Calibre and an interesting keyboard-based browser, vise.   

I am puzzled that I have not been able to use kitty consistently in my dropdown / scratchpad-based terminal setup---borrowed from Luke Smith.  The reasons for this elude me.   I can only imagine that an entire world exists consisting of the meta data and meta functions of terminals.   I have tried urxvt, su, xfce4-terminal, alacritty (another "gpu-based" terminal),

 

Others: a short list of programs useful to me:

• orage
• powerthesaurus: together with the emacs package by the same name
  
• eepclock
• xnviewmp
• posterazor: blowing up a graphic to print on multiple pages/panes
• dillo: a delightful lightweight browser---I use it for documentation.
• xtide and friends
• gri

My Free Software Story, a chapter

 For me, Free Software is a big deal.  My first whiff of it came from an article in InfoWorld, which I had subscribed to because I was interested in computers, and because it's free.  An article was describing or announcing something to do with the Free Software Foundation (FSF).   I had been standing on the precipice of a project to collect animal names in the language(s) of Chuuk Lagoon, where I was living, teaching, and learning.   My intention was to learn the names of animals so I couild discuss them with local fishermen, in furtherance of my plan to study traditional knowledge of marine life.    

I had received a computer as a gift from my mother, a Toshiba laptop, a really nice one.  But my mother did not understand that to use a computer, one needs software.  I might have had Microsoft word; I don't remember.  I had been living off-the-grid on the island of Tol, using a 10 Watt solar panel to trickle charge a 100 Amp-Hour deep cycle battery that had been given to me by someone in the U. S. Airforce CAT Team (short for Civic Action Team).  I also had a portable HP printer that I rigged up to run off of 12 Volts.  Software was the week link in my plan to "digitize" the names I had been writing down.

During my time in Chuuk, I had become known for my interest in animal names and any thing at all about the behavior, ecology...anything...about marine animals.  And about fishing.  Actually more just about ANYTHING anyone could talk to me about, pertinent to marine life.  Students were my teachers.   

 

I had tried to write the names down using the rudimentary editing software I had---possibly Microsoft Word.  But I could not easily write the diacritic marks used for some vowels in writing Chuukese.  I had approached some linguists at the University of Hawaii.  One of them, Robert Hsu, was kind enough to send a "demonstration copy" of an editor called "Multi-Edit" that was capable of doing what I had in mind.   One of the tricks among software vendors is to disseminate these demo, or evaluation, copies, but charge high prices for a full functioning copy.   I was working at a local Junior High School; my take-home pay was barely enough to cover food for the extended family of my wife.  To obtain the fullly enabled copy of the cripple-ware program Multi-Edit, together with a manual, would cost 300.00.  Not a chance.

I tried all kinds of things to try to learn how to type diacritics in Multi-Edit, but had failed.   When I saw the words "Free Software Foundation" in a small one-column article,   fewer than 15 lines long, my imagination ran wild.

 That was a time before the Internet had grown into what has now become.  Snail mail was the only mail, and on islands like Tol, accessible only by motor boat, and with not mail delivery, the "snails" servicing the mail were extremely slow.  I was spending way too much money on stamps in those days.  I wrote the FSF.  

 

Most of my letters never elicited a reply.  I was, therefore, shocked to receive a small box from the FSF some weeks later!   I had described my lexicon project in my letter to the FSF.  Whoever had read my letter must have understood my plea: I had received over 10 of those plastic 3-1/2" disks full of free software compiled for Microsoft Windows.   Remarkably, included in this package were a number of the Unix text tools, for sorting and manipulating text---beyond my wildest dreams.  And, of course, GNU/Emacs, in the form called "Demacs," a version ported to Microsoft Windows by two Japanese workers.   The unix tools were ported very early during the seminal stages of the Cygwin Project. 

These tools were immediately useful to me.  The biggest deal for me was that Emacs comes with documentation built in, as TexInfo files.   Within a shoret time I was able to figure out how to type in diacritical marks.  At the time, I had plenty of free time, so I was able to read most of the documentation, and set up Emacs to work for me, for useful work.   My innovations, made over the years, are still included in my init file!   

The FSF produced a "GNUS Bulletin", I think quarterly.  I had become a believer in this software, and  I read the GNUS/Bull from cover to cover.   At some point after a couple of years, a small article in the GNUS/Bull announced that two unix clone operating systems had become available:  Linux was one; the other was Free BSD.   When I traveled to Guam, I was able---with help---to download an early version of Slackware Linux.   

GNU/Linux had me, right from the start.  Free Software enabled my project.   Operating System it has been built by community action.  This story has been told many times.  Seldom has it gained traction.  But still, GNU/Linux is a phenomenon.  

As a teacher, at my schools were to be found dedicated administrators: that is, dedicated to buying all the possible proprietary software that government money could buy.   I knew that GNU/Linux was superior.  But it required some learning.   I taught some of my students to install and use GNU/Linux systems, and to build computers from parts.   

Trouble with Inkscape, Fonts, PDFs, Colors

Suddenly, my workflow with Inkscape had gone blewy!  I needed to invert the colors of a graph from Gri, but where for years this has been a routine process in Inkscape, it now had become obscure, or not possible.  Inkscape had gone to version 1.0.  Who'd expect this?

This is still a work in progress.  I reinstalled Manjaro GNU/Linux, was able to process the file, but it was no longer a straightforward matter. 

First, some fonts. 

This may all be a matter of changes I have been making to my Gri workflow.  We'll see. 

No blame.

Brief note on Manjaro and libraries, and install of Arch, then back to Manjaro

Distrohopping has not been my way, of late.  For a few years I have leaned heavily toward Arch Linux's infrastructure.  When stymied by Arch, I have several times thrown up my hands and installed Manjaro.

Manjaro is fine with me.  I am using Manjaro i3 Edition of late.  For over a year, I think.  I'm happy with i3.  Especially on a laptop, a few years old, i3 lag-freekeeps me lag-free.

This week I was furious when I learned that Manjaro (hence Arch) does not support the use of /usr/local.  I'm not ready to write a long piece about this, but it's pretty much the only big deal I have encountered with Arch, requiring an intervention to use it in my accustomed manner, my muscle memory workflow.

Well, maybe Muscle Memory is a little too much to say abot this glitch.  It's a PITA, though.   I installed a library in /usr/local/lib, and discovered that a certain program I had installed would not run, due to the need to take extra measured to ensure that /usr/local/lib would be visible to the linker.

The program was tideeditor, from the xtide suite of programs.  I have been self compiling these programs for years, without encountering this problem.  In about 1993 or 1994, I discovered Debian, or maybe 1995, after using Slackware for some years.  I learned from my experience with Debian the value of the /usr/local subtree: one thereby does not touch the files in the distribution itself.  I can install programs, do anything in /usr/local/ and it is mine, not part of the infrastructure provided by the "maintainers."

This week, after over 25 years of using GNU/Linux, I learned about this problem with /usr/local.  I went overboard, and decided to install Arch.  I was in a rush and apparently made some mistakes---not to mention that my storage is filling up on my Thinkpad Yoga.  The upshot was a rat's nest of errors.  I was unable to use Emacs. 

I had attempted to modify the instructions for a video for installing archlinux in 10 minutes using systemd-boot as the boot manager, while following the Archlinux Installation documentation.  It worked, but I seem to have skipped or messed up some steps, at least twice.  Although the new machine booted fine, I was unable to use Emacs as I am accustomed.

So after fiddling around a full day, and then some, I finalliy reached for Manjaro i3 Edition.

This is a masterpiece of guru magic.  Very well thought out.  A conky on the desktop screen has the important keystrokes on display in any open desktop. 
This installation is working extremely well, as I have modified it over time to fit my needs.  But not least of the fine features of this Manjaro i3 is the setup of the boot manager (which is grub.  That's fine.).  I was able to pick up the previous Manjaro right where I had left off.  And---this is what I like---now that the new Manjaro boot manager set up has been booted through and into the old install, on a different partition, it will remember this and boot to it every time, as long as I want.  That's a stroke of good magick.

Manjaro installed from a flash drive in perhaps 10-15 minutes til first reboot.  Few questions asked.

I follow this simple rule, which leaves me pain free: ALWAYS USE A SEPARATE /home PARTITION.  In any install of a distro, one can (in my experience) always find a way to specify that partition during the install process.  Step 2: I use dropbox for work that needs to be portable, including some config files.

Leaving me time to write the short bit.

By the way...

the program I was installing was tideeditor.  The library is libtcd.  I wrote a hasty email off to David Flater, the developer of Xtide and friends.  He answered with cut and pasted FAQs.  To his credit, he has always answered such inquiries from me, even though I have so often failed to check the FAQs before emailing.

Even more is this to his credit because, as I discovered when re-installing libtcd, a long message at the end, after typing "sudo make install," he has included a long explanation of this very problem---that the library is installed in /usr/local/lib, and that therefore some further steps may be necessary to make the library visible to programs.  WOW!  It's on me.

The best fix is to include a file in /etc/ld.conf.d/ pointing to /usr/local/lib.

And one question remains: why did this not happen on any earlier installs?

Useful Expedient Help: tldr, eg, gnu help2man; cheat for GNU/Linux

A Quick List:

• tldr :: (tl;dr == "too long didn't read") I installed as "tealdeer"
• eg :: gives examples for a given program
• GNU help2man ::  I haven't used, but it makes a man page from "--help" listing
• cheat :: cheat sheet for a given program

Where I'm coming from: 
  One of the things I like the best about GNU is the Man Pages.  It was, I think, a mandate: anyone can write a utility for a Unix-like Operating System, a system which is made up of multitudinous little programs that work together.  Today, it is becoming more common NOT to follow that convention.

  The man page format is something else, however: it seems to assume that the GNU/Linux user (and any Unix-like OS user) is able to read that crazy listing of arcane specs about a program.

TLDR solves my problem, which is the inconvenience of reading through a lengthy man page to figure out how to run a program.

Then I can consult a man page for more focused in advice.

Toward a HOWTO : Modifying cb2Bib to enable the use of the Annotation field natively

[I am posting this, even though it is is a month or two old, and not finished, with the intention of finishing it soon.  A new version of Cb2Bib was recently released.  It is still possible to use a patch to incorporate these modifictions.  AED] 

This Micro-HOWTO describes a method for modifying the source code of Cb3Bib, to make it possible to easily generate annotations and print PDFs of the database with comments or, if you like, annotations.  This is the one thing I have wanted most from Cb2Bib, Pere Constans's amazing reference database program.  More information, and the program itself, can be found on the website.  Most GNU/Linux distribution provides a package for Cb2Bib.

The instructions I am providing are rudimentary.  For now I will provide a patch for Cb2bib's source code, and a revised *bst for LaTeX's BibTeX component.  This is not necessarily easy, but it works.  At some point, I hope to present more thorough instructions.  I will not be able, unfortunately, to provide assistance in setting this up; I have barely been able to get it running myself.

Here's the workflow for literature searches, to generate a reference list for the libraries.

1. Search for the references using Google Scholar
2. Start up cb2bib (it's easier, but not essential, to do it before saving a citation.
3. Having previously set up Google Scholar to produce bibliographic citations in the BibTeX format 
4. Click on the Bibtex link underneath a useful item in the research results.
5. With cb2Bib running, the GUI text input widgets may fill in, if you are fairly luck.
6. If the Author, Title, Etc, text widgets are populated, select a *.bib database file, and save (click on the icon with a Floppy Dist).  Don't worry: this is not a complicated file; it can be edited using a text editor.  Emacs's Bibtex Mode is awesome for this.
7. Open a new window (I think this is an editor window) by clicking on the icon with a pencil on it, to the far right at the bottom.
8. Go to this new window frame, open "Files" and select "Postprocess and show ..", proceed.
9. A pdf will be displayed.  For me it is displayed either by Evince ("DocumentViewer") or Okular.  Whatever is the default.

This workflow is streamlined and easy.

Perhaps even MORE magical is the way Cb2Bib handles a selections from any source, in guiding the generation of a record for the database.  I will not discuss this.  I should mention that Pere Constans has spent a considerable amount of time developing an "Annote" capacity; I have not gotten my head around it, however useful it may be for others.

What is missing for me is a means to type in a comment or annotation, and the automatic inclusion of this comment in the printed PDF.  A trivial benefit would be to present the Call Number of a book. An annotated bibliography is the obvious target for this kind of work flow.

Pere has done a great service to me, in providing instructions how to modify the code to obtain this result. Now, on page 2 of the input screens is found a space to type an "Annotation", where "Annote" used to be.  Through modification of a BibTeX .bst file, to print the Annotation field.

First, the source code must be patched.  I have had to keep my eye out for some minor glitches that may come up during the implementation of the revised program.  I found it necessary to delete all files left behind by a previous copy of Cb2Bib, including files in the ~/.config directory under MOLSpaces.

Patching cb2bib source code

  

Linux Adventure: Manjaro, i3, and Ranger with notes on Arch linux

I have started running the i3 window manager on my Linux boxes.  I have installed Manjaro on both.  One of them is running Manjaro's i3 community edition; the other one, I think, started with an xfce4 version of Manjaro, to which I added the i3 window manager. 

It's been an adventure.  It's been this way for over 2 weeks now, and I'm not sure I'll go back to XFCE4 or Gnome.  I have distro-hopped for a good many years, and convinced myself of the advantages of various options along the way.  XFCE4 has gotten to be a favorite over the past "few" years.  It's pretty intuitive, and it doesn't get in my way much.  That's not much to say, but this isn't a review of XFCE4.  I would say, though, that if I do decide to abandon i3, XFCE4 would probably be a first step. 

i3 is something different: a tiling window manager.  I have tried a couple of these, and generally given up in a few minutes, due to the excessive amount of tweaking and steep learning curves of, for example, OpenBox.  i3, however, was pretty easy to use out of the box: I couldn't do everything in the world with it, but I could do just about anything, one way or another.  I reached some limit after a few tries, and abandoned it for a while, but I have come back, and challenged myself to learn enough to make myself dangerous. 

Manjaro is a compromise.  Arch is my goto OS, but my lack of boot manager chops generally abandons me somewhere along the line.  I was able to install Arch to my self-contructed box, Beast, but used a bootctl configuration.  Bootctl is much easier to configure on a new machine than grub, for my money.  I dislike grub very much,  But when it comes to multiple boots, I am out of my depth, so I installed Ubuntu, which does a decent job with grub out of the box, and leaves my machine easily bootable onto the Arch install on the machine.  Manjaro also does a nice job of installing. 

It has a peculiarity that has been noticed by others: once Manjaro has been installed, a manjaro splash screen is seemingly indelibly ingrained into the system, even when another OS like Ubuntu is installed over it.  I suspect that the developer(s) of Manjaro are quite knowledgeable about the fine points.  This bugs me, but I live with it.  Because Manjaro just works. 

It is an Arch Linux system with some differences, that allows me to use the AUR "repository" that makes Arch so amazingly able to easily install almost any software out there that conforms to basic source code packaging tenets of Unix. 

I am in awe of the cleanness of Arch.  The developers keep the components up to date remarkably well.  I have one Arch install that has been abandoned because of a mistake of my own installing a software package that required the Wine windoze emulator, and the result was that the desktop manager doesn't work anymore; and somehow the system seems to be corrupted.  I have to use startx to start XFCE4 or Gnome.  Ideally I would reinstall Arch. 

But I know enough to make myself dangerous; not enough to administer a GNU/Linux - Unix system at the lowest level.  I take shortcuts, so I suppose it is inevitable that I would be bitten.  But in general, I can go a long, long time just upgrading the Arch system without any issues that I know about.  I know about the precautions against deviating from the official repository, just like I know I should read every click-license.  But life is too short.

Today, I experienced something to remind me of how awesome Arch is: during an update of my Manjaro box, I started receiving a message that an update could not be performed because a certain file already existed on my filesystem.  I tried several things.  Then I remembered: I should do a search.  I use Google, with some regrets.  Duck-Duck-Go would probably work or other search engines.  But Google is an awesome search engine, as it has been since I started using it in about 1993, when it was just being developed at Stanford on Linux boxes. 

I searched the name of the file and "Arch" and "update".  A few key words usually work.  And up popped at the top of the search a message stating that upgrading requires manual intervention.  The name of the file was given, so I deleted it as suggested, and .....  Voila!  the update ran without a hitch.

This happens many times.  Well, not MANY, but it happens.  The secret is to compose a proper search, when one runs into a problem. 

Manjaro is an Arch Linux system, with some differences, most of which I don't know about.  It's easy to install, vs. Arch's somewhat more difficult installation---especially installing the boot manager.  I haven't noticed any problems with Wifi hardware for a while, excpety for an iMac, and that doesn't count as enything but domestic terrorism. 

Once it's installed it IS an arch system, with a few differences, some of which I understand.  The repos are different, so that updates are more hands on by the higher echelon developers of Manjaro.  The kernel is not as up to date, but it's reasonably recent.  I think if I understood, I could easily adopt a newer and crazier kernel, and I might try one of these days to bring the kernel up to the level of the NVME I have installed.  Most of the software on Arch repos is found on Manjaro's, but M's are not as up to date, and perhaps are under some micro-control, version wise.

Youart is a package manager with extended capabilities to deal with AUR packages.  This is already installed on Manjaro, requiring little setup to start using.  AUR. Arch User Repository (I think).

More to follow.

Mounting Google Drive on a GNU/Linux system

First, the following post worked, with the proviso/modification that I am not using Ubuntu.  I installed google-drive-ocamlfuse as an AUR build, and followed the simple steps from the post. 

Wonderful...

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/04/mount-google-drive-ocamlfuse-linux

1. Install google-drive-ocamlfuse
2. run $ google-drive-ocamlfuse
3. $ mkdir ~/googledrive
4. get a cold drink ready
5. run $ google-drive-ocamlfuse ~/googledrive
6. open up a file manager!  (I used caja)

 
According to this post, one can open files with standard tools on GNU/Linux, unlike the web version of Google Drive.

But the following is a bit of a problem for someone who, like me, is forgetful:

1. When you are done, run this:
   

   $ fusermount -u ~/google-drive

WISHLIST: Scavenging titles from PDFs for use as filenames

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?!  

  
  

  
  

Tide graph experiment: seeking a colorblind friendly palette

This is a first try.  I am working on a graph of height of tide as a function of (x) clock time.

This time, I have used the "Juxtapose" web tool to compare a graph (work in progress) with a simulation in The Gimp of what this image would or might look like to a person who is somewhat  colorblind with Deuteranomaly (apparently weak green vision).  For this simulation I have used the Color Vision Deficiency python plugin for the Gimp.
We can be pretty sure that these figures do not look like this to colorblind people; but I can see that my intense, contrasting color palette does not work to discriminate the different lines for persons with color deficient vision.

The color deficit is Deuteranomaly weak green. Pull the slider to the right to see the original image; slide to the left to see the simulation of what we may think a person with this deficit in color vision might see.
Scroll further down to see another type of colorblindness.
The objective will be to produce colorblind-friendly graphs. I found this on the blog of the website with the slider maker: https://knightlab.northwestern.edu/2016/07/18/three-tools-to-help-you-make-colorblind-friendly-graphics/index.html

1.  http://colorbrewer2.org
2.  Chroma
3. Checking: other ways to visualize/simulate your work

•  Color Oracle (available on Archlinux AUR)

                  [Depends on Java 6, not officially supported by Arch]

• Sim-Daltonism(iOS or MacOS only)