Back to Linux Series 3

Actual work

My daily work consists of writing, geospatial data wrangling and modelling, and more varieties of writing or otherwise communicating. Sometimes I like to fiddle with other tech stuff, such as web maps, SDI web services, API development.

I need more apps:

  • MS Teams
  • QGIS Desktop
  • Inkscape and Drawing
  • LibreOffice

Also, we have a network printing system, and of course Windows shares.

  • Samba and smbmount, done, but it seems Thunar by default only seems to mount my local Windows partition in read-only mode.
  • CUPS printing system

Emails:

So far I have used Thunderbird exclusively on Windows and Linux. I have accumulated ca 15 GB of maildirs in my Windows account user home. While I am very used to Thunderbird, some things I haven’t quite figured out in my everyday work. Some people do the Inbox Zero thing, others use the inbox synonymously as All My Mail (tm). I have a few extra folders to keep some mails of out my main inbox, but mostly I use the unread marker together with sorting by date (desc) and unread as my main means of keeping track of what I have to catch up with. Also, I have at least 3 comparatively active account, Yahoo, Gmail and my MS Office365 work account.

However, searching older mails is sometimes not as practical in Thunderbird. In most cases I get away with the quickfilter in the main inbox folders, but that requires some metadata memory of what I am looking for. Older things, like 1-2 years old, I barely can remember exact email addresses or especially subject lines related to the topic of interest.

So, as I am a fan of command-line-fu(it’s a thing, cf: commandlinefu.com), I am playing with the thought of entering the world of shell-based email handling. In particular the following combo seems a popular choice.

  • Neomutt - Email client
  • NeoVim - Email editor

  • Notmuch - Email indexer (for searching)

  • https://uttarayan.me/posts/setting-up-neomutt/
  • https://jonathanh.co.uk/blog/mutt-setup/
  • https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard

Nerd stuff

I got a bit carried away and installed more fonts and symbols and I am going to try:

  • Starship: the cross-shell prompt for astronauts
  • Fish: the friendly interactive shell

Probably both a waste of time for now, but hey, it might be nice.

Also, I love vim, I’ll give nvim a short over the next time. I guess, it won’t be much of a difference, since I don’t do much magic with vim plugins … yet :-) Here are some links to try, I am really keen on checking that out myself:

Kitty terminal turned out to be quite nice with Jesse’s config. But then, it is a terminal and the defualt XFCE4 terminal is also nice. Anyhow, playing around with both. I also found more interesting materials to style up NVIM:

  • Jesse Archer’s dotfiles for nvim: https://github.com/jessarcher/dotfiles/tree/master/nvim/plugins
  • DistroTube: https://gitlab.com/dwt1/dotfiles/-/blob/master/.config/nvim/init.vim

N/VIM plugins, omg, you can get lost.

Also, backup

Admittedly, I haven’t done actual backups of my file systems regularly, as most of my work stuff is either in GitHub, Google Cloud Buckets, Nextcloud or shared network drives. And privately I use Google Drive/Google One and NextCloud as well.

So, I thought ahead and configured my Linux system with BTRFS and hope to test Timeshift!

joplin

We’ll see how that goes.