Zach Peters Homepage

Bruno

Burno is an Opensource IDE for exploring and testing APIs. This could be compared to software like Postman and Insomnia. Over the past years my feeling is that both of the prior have become overly slow and bloated. While you can export data, I never felt like I had full control of the configurations and data I was creating.

With Bruno you get a pretty minimalist (yet powerful) interface. All basic http opeartions are supported. There is a full scripting and a basic testing interface. This is the perfect mix of what I'm looking for. The added advantage over similar software is that the configurations are simple plain text. Again, the power of plain text.

Helix

Helix is a post-modern text editor that is written with speed and comfort in mind. For me I see this as the best possible version of Vim. The learning curve is more gentle than "normal" Vim thanks to the built-in menu system. It took a while for me to get used to the "reverse" selection Helix is selection → action instead of action → selection like vim. See Migrating from Vim , but it has been slowly growing on me. At this point vim is now an alias to hx for me!

Logseq

It's hard for me to classify Logseq. In many ways its a very simple application - you edit markdown files. With that simplicity there is a lot of power. You can very easily transform a file into a calendar entry, a checklist, a project plan, etc. The text based format for me is the clincher. Notion does have a lot flashier interface, but when I used it I never felt like i owned my data with Logseq, everything is a text file that i am free to copy elsewhere or take to another program if I want to switch.

What i really like about Logseq over other editors is the outline first Hierarchical organization and structure are prioritized over "raw" markdown. Instead of a free-form Word document, imagine a permanent bullet-point list for everything on the page - each being able to be linked to, referenced, and embedded from anywhere else paradigm. This takes a while to wrap your head around, but once you adapt to that notion, it is very easy to make simple and efficient outlines and then expand on notes, links to specific blocks, etc. Logseq - A Powerful Tool for Thought has a really good summary of the strengths and power of logseq.

VHS

As you can see from the demo below, VHS is a screen recorder for the terminal. For terminal based apps a lot of time a text description is great, but a screencast is really great for showing off how commands can work together and for showing off tui apps. There is another app called asciinema but I enjoy this a little more.

There are some more advanced commands, but this is what i normally use: vhs record > my_recording.tape start hacking and exit when you are done vhs my_recording.tape this renders the actions to a gif Bonus tip to reduce the size of the gif: gifsicle --run "gifsicle --resize-width 300 --colors 256 out.gif > resized.gif"

The other thing i find really cool is that the tape file is just a text file with some markup and commands. That means that you can manually edit it and re-render it at any point, there are even themes!