All That Software On My PC. What Do I Actually Use?

recently on the channel i've been noticing a lot more questions regarding the software that i use people want to know hey dt what window manager are you using in that video what terminal emulator what browser do you use people just want to know what software i use you know for various tasks and i can understand that because my youtube channel now in about a week or so is going to turn three years old we've actually been doing this for three full years because i started in october of 2017 and i've made nearly 800 videos in that time but almost none of my subscribers have been here from day one nobody watched video number one and have been here ever since maybe a few of you guys and those of you that have been here for the whole time i do appreciate that but most of my subscribers are probably people that just subscribed this year in 2020 well you know probably half of them and a lot of those people really don't know what i use as far as the applications i use on a regular basis so today's video is going to be talking about the software that i use i think the place to start is window managers the number one question i get is hey dt what's your window manager what window measure are you using in this video that video i will go ahead and tell you guys i switch window managers a lot when i'm making my videos i'm not in the same window manager all the time when i make my videos but if you're asking me typically what window manager do i use chances are you know better than not that i'm going to be in xmo.net it's kind of always been my favorite window manager it's just really comfy it's fast of course the more i learn haskell the easier this thing is to config and it's very extensible very configurable very powerful i just love exmonet it's a dynamic tiling window manager i prefer dynamic window managers so it's got the master and stack layout which i love you know i can just do anything i want in exmo ned and i'm got it configured with some really neat extensions like the tree select menu here which is pretty cool if i you know wanted to search through some bookmarks here and launched something i could i also played with the grid select menu as well and i actually did videos about both the grid select menu the tree select menu i've done a lot of exmonet videos in the past so that's typically the one i'm in if i'm not in exmoned if you guys spot me using a window manager that's not xmo ned it's probably one of three other window managers qtile awesome or dwm why is because all of those are also dynamic tiling window managers and i like dynamic tiling window managers i don't usually use i3 bs pwm or herb slip wm because those are not dynamic tilers they have a different kind of workflow i don't like their workflow people have also asked me because i've done videos about them in the past stump wm which is kind of an emacs like window manager and i trashed that on video because i couldn't figure the dang thing out it was very tough to configure stump wm and get it working right people have also asked me about exwm which is really just an emacs extension that allows you to turn emacs into a window manager and you know instead of logging into a window manager really you just log into emacs and it becomes your window manager but i don't really use stump wm or exwm i've made a decision that i need to go back and revisit stump wm at some point because i don't think i gave it a fair shot and the more i become comfortable with emacs and with programming and lisp i think i might be able to get stump wm to a level where i at least don't hate it but i'm not sure when i'm going to get back to that but as far as window managers you know chances are that if you're asking me what window manager i'm using at the moment it's probably x-moned probably the next most common question i get is what what browser do i use and i use multiple web browsers i've made videos about a lot of web browsers i think that's why people ask me hey are you still using this web browser you still using that web browser i have five or six different web browsers installed on my main production machine so yes most of the videos that i've made about web browsers yes i actually still have those web browsers installed on the system and i do occasionally use them but if you had to pin me down and say hey what web browser do you typically use i typically use mozilla firefox this is the one i typically use it's just the standard as far as open source web browsers it's not chromium based which i like and mozilla is one of the largest uh open source companies out there as far as a company making open source software so i like supporting them i like pushing them but another browser that i do sometimes use i use the cute browser i have the cute browser if i'm not using firefox i'm probably using the cute browser actually so if i you know wanted to do something in the cute browser i could and yeah and it's not a bad browser it's a pretty okay browser actually but the problem with the cube browser is the ad blocking in it now i'm one of these people i don't mind looking at ads um as somebody that has made a lot of money from ads as far as of course youtube videos here in the last three years but even going way back in the early days of the web you know when i was first getting into designing websites building websites for my own for marketing reasons you know i'm putting ads on those websites you know there's a lot of people on the web that make a living because of ad revenue so i don't like blocking ads typically just browsing the web but i do need to block ads when i make my videos because if i'm making a video and in that video i open up a web browser and maybe play a youtube video i don't want a youtube ad to play during that video or even worse because i don't often play other people's videos or even my videos but i typically do show you guys news articles and so many of those news sites are just littered with ads some of them multimedia ads you know with a lot of flashiness and bling to them that is very distracting so i need a proper ad blocker when i record my videos and using a web browser in my video so when any time you see me using a web browser and a video typically i'm using firefox now on my phone i use brave i made a video about the brave browser it's a chromium-based browser it's very privacy and security oriented it blocks a lot of uh tracking and you know nasty stuff like that and you know you block all your javascript stuff and on the desktop i'm not that concerned with that stuff that's why i still use firefox plus i can do a lot of that stuff in firefox too but on my mobile phone on my android device brave is my browser on my phone it's been the browser on my phone since i made my video about the brave browser for the desktop i installed their mobile app because i don't want to use google chrome on my android phone i just don't trust it i think in that situation brave makes a lot of sense so and i've been happy with it as a mobile web browser might be something you guys should check out as well people often ask me about email clients kind of like i've been using mozilla firefox since the early early days since mozilla first started i've been a thunderbird user since the beginning as well although there are other graphical email clients that are really nice geary is another one that i've used a lot here in the last year or two and it's got a really clean interface simple interface it's nice looking but thunderbird is kind of a standard it's cross-platform of course because you can use it on windows and on linux in terminal based uh email clients i have used neomutt a lot in years past and it's okay it can be a chore to set up but it says somebody that's used it a lot over the years i've gotten the hang of setting up neomutt but here recently and this is going to be a recurring theme because of getting really into emacs so many of my daily applications now have just been replaced by emacs and that's kind of what is going on with my email client because now really my email client is simply emacs because i just launched mu4e which is the email client inside emacs here and get into my inbox here for my email here and i could read i don't know i could read this mastodon post that somebody mentioned me in i don't know hopefully it's nothing crazy in that it doesn't look like there is but anyway mu4e is a emacs email client and it's just fantastic it's really so much better than neo mud if you're using emacs you should just use mu4e for your email client there's really no need to even explore any other options and since i brought up emacs people keep asking me what text editor do you really use because i see you use emags in a video the next day i see you use them in a video i use both typically i use emacs anytime i'm gonna spend some serious time in a text editor like a lot of time doing something like say configuring a window manager and it's a window manager that i haven't used before playing around with much and i'm going to be working in this thing for a while i'm pulling up emacs for that so that's always what i anytime if i was going to do any kind of creative writing you know or something like that i'm going to pull up emags to do that but if i'm in a terminal and i'm often you know playing around in the terminal i do a lot of my file management in the terminal you just cd around in the terminal and do what you need to do and if i just need to do a quick edit of something a quick edit of some configuration file something in the slash etsy directory or maybe i want to make a quick edit to my bash rc or something like that yeah i just do it in vim i'm already in the terminal why not why launch emacs for that now emacs is always running on my system because i run the emacs daemon you know all my emacs windows are actually just client windows there's always a emac server running so i could just launch emacs but then i'd have the terminal window still open and then i'd have emacs open where if i just launch vim of course the terminal window goes away well it doesn't go away but vm is running inside the terminal window it's just a cleaner easier way to get something done rather quickly now i mentioned i do a lot of my file management in the terminal and that is true but people want to know about file managers well the terminal is my file manager for the most part i rarely need to open a file manager these days i just do everything in the terminal but there are situations where i need a proper file manager and if i need a graphical file manager the one i typically install and use is pc man fm because it's light minimal there's not a lot of dependencies with it and it just works especially with standalone window managers which is all i use you know all my tiling window managers or even floating window managers like open box flux box things like that pc man fm just makes perfect sense i wouldn't use anything else as far as a gui file manager i mean thunar i guess is okay but things like nautilus and dolphin people ask me hey why do you have a problem with gnome's nautilus file manager well at least back in the day nautilus had some dependencies and it also took over your desktop like it you know determined whether icons could be placed on the desktop and you know had some other things that were tied into it more than what i wanted a file manager to be i just need a file manager to be a file manager so that's why you typically don't see people using gnome's nautilus file manager on a standalone window manager dolphin is a great file manager kde's file manager but it has a lot of kde dependencies no one would install dolphin unless they were running kde so that's why pcman fm is just the best choice some people have asked me about terminal file managers i i have used a lot of vifm in the past it is a great terminal file manager it's really nice i mean i like it i've got the image previews working here in uberzog i mean i mean it's got a lot of them navigation stuff you know hjkl and bookmarks i could gh to go home meaning the home directory gg to go to the top of this document which is really just the top of the file manager and if i wanted to i could even colon queue to quit so that's vi fm it is a nice terminal based file manager but typically i just do things in the terminal a pc man fm i use sometimes because sometimes i have to have a graphical file manager because sometimes i like to be able to go and drag programs from my file manager into another program i often do this when i start doing video editing and audio editing i'm dragging all these video clips that i just recorded into caden live and i can do that with pc man fm i can't really do that with a terminal based file manager so that's why i have both pc man fm and vifm on the system but unless i really need to be able to drag and drop files into a file manager these days again what i typically use for a file manager is emacs i just use the built-in directory editor inside emacs so typically i even have it hotkeyed just to go straight to the directory editor inside emacs this is my home directory you know in deer ed in emacs and yeah that's kind of what i've replaced vifm with that's kind of what i'm doing these days and it makes sense because typically if i'm in a file manager i'm probably looking for some kind of file some kind of document to edit anyway emacs is my preferred editor so dear ed is where it's at for those of you that want to know about the programs i use to make my videos because a lot of you guys are aspiring to start your own youtube channel and do some creative stuff with video so every video i make i record using a piece of software called obs the open broadcaster software it's free and open source software it's pretty much the gold standard everybody uses obs pretty much obs is almost always the program people use to live stream on things like youtube and twitch and other platforms but even not live streaming i just do pre-recorded content and i recorded all in obs it is the thing that allows me to switch scenes like switching to my desktop here or later i'm going to thank my patrons and i'm going to you know show these screens in that screen and end screen and this is all done with obs the open broadcaster software i edit my audio if i need to edit my audio in audacity i do all of my video editing using a program called caden live and i've done some videos on caden live in the past check those out if you need help getting started with caden live there is a little bit of a high barrier to entry with caden live it's not that intuitive when you first get into it i do all of my channel artwork and everything my thumbnails i do that in and i made a video about that in the past as well how i create my thumbnails using as far as just using my computer you know what video player do i use what audio player do i use well my video player is mpv it's just standard mpv i do have vlc also installed on the system just in case and i have that for specialized reasons really because sometimes i want to be able to switch audio tracks on something you know only listen to track one or track two you know on a multi-track recording and vlc makes that really easy where so you know mpv is a lot more minimal by design my audio player of choice my music player is a gui program called dead beef but once again because of emacs emacs has some plugins that you can install that are audio players music players and the one i've been using in emacs is one called e-m-m-s the e-max multimedia system and that's kind of replaced a lot of my music players the next category of software people ask me about all the time is terminal emulators because i've made so many videos about different terminal emulators and right now my terminal emulator is alacrity that's the one i typically use so if i just do super enter here in xml now this is the alacrity terminal it's just really nice and it's fast it's very easy to configure it's a perfect terminal emulator i love it in the past i have used things like xterm and urxvt and termite and st all really good terminal emulators as a matter of fact i think i probably have all or at least most of them installed on my system right now i know i have x term on the system i usually install x term as a backup terminal emulator anyway because sometimes i install window managers especially window managers that i've never used before and sometimes hard coded in their key bindings is the ability to bring up an x term so it's nice just to have x term on the system anyway um st i know i have my own build of st on my gitlab page i also have my own build of st hosted in the aur if you guys want to check it out but again kind of like everything else you know emacs i actually could just open up a terminal in emacs this is the v term in emacs and you know it's like any other terminal emulator if i do an ls you know it's as good as any other terminal emulator the only thing is when i close it it's asking me do i absolutely want to close it i probably could edit that or configure that in such a way that it wouldn't ask me that kind of safety question but in emacs i have both the e-shell and v-term so i have two different terminal emulators if you will inside e-max that i can use and i use those more and more and they've kind of replaced alacrity to a degree and along the same lines people often ask me regardless of what terminal emulator i'm running hey what shell are you running well i'm running bash by default these days why it's just bash is okay right bash has kind of been the standard i like bash but i have zsh installed on the system if i type zsh here we'll switch over to the zsh shell it looks like i got some errors or something it's expecting the power level 10k zsh theme to be installed on my system it's not but that's okay but you know this is the zsh prompt just a standard csh prompt you know there's no oh my zsh going on here although if you wanted to you could really pimp out zsh with the oh my zsh plugins and of course i have fish also installed on the system this is just a default fish prompt i haven't configured it in any way but you can use the oh my fish plug-in system with the fish shell to do some customization but for most people probably bash is okay if you do a lot in the shell as far as interactive stuff with the shield do some interactive scripting on the fly at the command line it might be worth it to to switch to fish because fish does make a lot of improvements like fish is really what a shell should be the problem with fish is it's not posix compliant where bash and zsh are pretty much posix compliant they're not really posix compliant but they're close enough where fish you can't just switch fish over to being your system's default shell it typically breaks things out that was my experience when i tried it anyway i also have the new shield installed on my system as well it is a power shell kind of clone it's not really a powershell clone but it's very similar to powershell and look and feel people often ask me about colors and theming and fonts and things like that and these things change a lot so depending on what video you watch it could be one thing it could be another but here in the last year or so chances are the color schemes that you saw me using if it was a terminal color scheme or an e max color scheme was pill night but i have recently switched color schemes this is no longer the pale night color scheme this is actually if i launch emacs here i am using the standard theme from doom emacs doomy max the default theme is doom one let me find that yeah the doom theme is called doom 1 and i just went ahead and adapted the doom 1 theme over to my terminal color scheme and i'm going to adapt it to my xmo bar panel here in xmode and i'm just you know that's something i've been doing here in the last couple of weeks is playing around with the color scheme i've been using pill knight forever and i thought it was time for a change and i thought the doom one theme the default theme and doomy max really looked good and i was like wait let me see if i can adapt that to be my colors and everything and it's something that's a work in progress as far as fonts the terminal fonts the mono space fonts that i've been using for much of the past year have been mono noki although recently i decided to switch fonts let me open up emacs again and get back into that config file the fonts i'm using right now are source code pro i'm using the source code pro nerd font and it looks really good it's very clean very readable i did a video about my favorite mono space fonts a little while back too so you guys should check that out some other miscellaneous software people have asked about recently pass which is a password manager it's kind of like the standard unix password manager yes i still use that i use pass and i use pass menu if i'm in a window manager that's not exmoned in xmo ned there's actually pass menu built into it if you add a specific module and i'll show you that if i do this key combination here you know i can search for i don't know my ssh password right and that's a pass menu basically built into xmonet the last thing i want to mention is hypervisors virtual machines because i've been getting a lot of people asking me about virtual box and vert manager do i actually use both do i prefer one over the other i typically use vert manager i made a video about vert manager a little while back and i do like vert manager sometimes i do use virtualbox on video depending on what i'm doing because i have found some operating systems some linux distributions work better in virtualbox rather than verb manager and vice versa the other thing is sometimes if i'm doing a video specifically geared toward new linux users i know they're probably still running windows and i want to show them how to install linux in a vm to test linux out i'm going to show them how to do that in virtualbox why virtualbox runs on windows it also runs on mac and also runs on linux vert manager though is kvm it's the kernel virtual machine it only runs on linux so it doesn't make sense for me to do a video that's mainly geared toward people that are probably still using windows and then show them how to do something invert manager they're not going to be able to do it so in that case i'm going to use virtualbox so i think that's it for this rather lengthy rant video although i understand why so many people ask these kinds of questions about the software i use when i look back at the videos i've made i've demonstrated so many different window managers and web browsers and text editors and file managers and terminal emulators and things on my channel it's very easy for people to be confused about the software i use because i can't possibly use all of that software i've shown on my videos and you're right so i understand why some of you guys really just want to get me in a corner and pin me down it's like hey dd what what browser do you really use so i hope this video here at least answered some of your questions before i go i need to thank a few special people though i need to thank the producers of this show i need to thank michael gabe corbinian mitchell devin fran arch 5530 economy chuck claudio donnie dillon george kell of devils lewis paul scott and willie they are my highest dear patrons over on patreon they are the producers of this episode i also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen all these names you see on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on patreon because this channel is supported by you guys the community if you'd like to support my work please consider doing so look for distrotube over on patreon alright guys peace you

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 96,556

Keywords: distrotube, linux, gnu linux, free software, open source software, linux software, linux programs, linux applications, linux apps, best free software, window managers, text editors, file managers, terminal emulators, web browsers, virtual machines, linux audio, linux video, emacs, vim, emacs vs vim, terminal theme, terminal colors, terminal fonts

Id: _UNRVybAJTs

Length: 24min 23sec (1463 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 02 2020