this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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Why software do you use in your day-to-day computing which might not be well-known?

For me, there are ~~two~~ three things for personal information management:

  • for shopping receipts, notes and such, I write them down using vim on a small Gemini PDA with a keyboard. I transfer them via scp to a Raspberry Pi home server on from there to my main PC. Because it runs on Sailfish OS, it also runs calendar (via CalDav) and mail nicely - and without any FAANG server.

  • for things like manuals and stuff that is needed every few months ("what was just the number of our gas meter?" "what is the process to clean the dishwasher?") , I have a Gollum Wiki which I have running on my Laptop and the home Raspi server. This is a very simple web wiki which supports several markup languages (like Markdown, MediaWiki, reStructuredText, and Creole), and stores them via git. For me, it is perfect to organize personal information around the home.

  • for work, I use Zim wiki. It is very nice for collecting and organizing snippets of information.

  • oh, and I love Inkscape(a powerful vector drawing program), Xournal (a program you can write with a tablet on and annotate PDFs), and Shotwell (a simple photo manager). The great thing about Shotwell is that it supports nicely to filter your photos by quality - and doing that again and again with a critical eye makes you a better photographer.

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[–] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Interesting. Have you tried Stumpwm as well, and if so, how would you compare it to Herbstluftwm?

[–] sxan@midwest.social 1 points 3 hours ago

That's one I don't remember, but I probably wouldn't have: the config file is in Lisp. Not only is Lisp something I never use anymore, which gives it a high cognitive load, but I don't particularly care for Lisp-like syntax.

I'm certain there are several less common WMs that I haven't tried. It'd probably be almost impossible to try every WM every written for X; it seems to be a common hobby project for folks interested in the X protocol.

I did say "almost every", but perhaps even that was exaggeration. I do think I've tried the majority, though.

My differentiator for hlwm, the killer feature, shared by only two other projects that I'm aware of, is that hlwm has no configuration file. All configuration is performed through client commands. Every command interaction that can be performed by a user input - and much that can't - can also be performed on the CLI. All (?) windowing events can also be monitored on the command line, and therefore scripted. The other two WMs that share at least some of these features are bspwm and river.