---
title: "My preferred tools"
description: "A whirlwind tour of my preferred command-line tools."
date: 2019-06-29
---

Tools shape our perception of problems.
That is, one's proficiency with a certain set of tools, and personal preference for some tools over others, suggests and sometimes limits, not only how we tackle a given problem, but also _what_ exactly we attempt to solve.
Hence, let me introduce you to my preferred tools so you may get a feeling for my view on software.

_Disclaimer:_
Follow the hyperlinks at your own risk.
You might end up in a rabbit hole.

I prefer to use and _compose_ small, sharp tools as coined by Eric Steve Raymond in his book [The Art of Unix Programming](http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/).
Think [sed](https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/sed.html), [rsync](https://rsync.samba.org/), [cURL](https://curl.se/), and [friends](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Unix_commands&oldid=892119460).
As such, I feel most comfortable on the command-line of Unix-like, do-it-yourself operating systems like [Arch Linux](https://archlinux.org/), [FreeBSD](https://www.freebsd.org/), and [OpenBSD](https://www.openbsd.org/).
Most of the time, you'll see my terminal [Solarized](https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/) and tiled by [tmux](https://github.com/tmux/tmux).

When it comes to editing source code and markup, I rely on _the ubiquitous text editor_ [Vim](https://www.vim.org/) with a few, handpicked plug-ins like [Fugitive](https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive).
Needless to say, I prefer the keyboard over a mouse or touch interface --- a split keyboard with a Dvorak layout and a compose key to draw German umlauts.

I love to search my files at the speed of light using [fzf](https://github.com/junegunn/fzf) and [ripgrep](https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep), both inside and outside of Vim.
I enjoy to version control my files --- not just code but also configuration, notes, and this very blog --- with [Git](https://git-scm.com/).
As a matter of fact, even my favorite password manager, [pass](https://www.passwordstore.org/), uses Git under the hood to track changes.

Writing of source code, I favor two, arguably polar opposite programming languages.
On the one hand, I love [Go](https://golang.org/) for its straightforwardness, exhaustive standard library and excellent tooling.
On the other hand, I am deeply attracted by the expressiveness and safety of [Haskell](https://www.haskell.org/).
Considering documentation, I generally forechoose [Asciidoctor](https://asciidoctor.org/)'s extension of [Asciidoc](http://asciidoc.org/) over anybody's flavor of [Markdown](https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/).
Finally, I prefer to store and evaluate large amounts of structured information using [SQLite](https://sqlite.org/index.html) and [PostgreSQL](https://www.postgresql.org/).

When you read this far without loosing yourself in the numerous hyperlinks above, you deserve yourself a cookie.
Otherwise, remember that a tool without a purpose is a toy --- and that's fine.