Something like vim-table-mode work as an improvement? You got me there though, tables can be a real pain in a terminal.

For the second, I setup an on save hook or watch script to build a PDF and open it. Its been a minute, but I think I had to find a PDF viewer that would refresh if already open and keep the current position on subsequent opens.

Best of luck finding something that works for you!

Need more info.

The answer will still and always be, just use nvim.

What features do these dedicated tools have that make you want to use something other than nvim?

I haven’t made a keyboard in awhile but anything that supports QMK (or whatever is new and shiny today) should be able to support this.

QMK and the like are custom firmware so you can pretty much code up whatever feature you need.

If you are looking for a pre-built, I know my Tofu65 supports QMK from https://kbdfans.com/.

QMK is written in C but they do have a no code tool I used for my Tofu65: https://config.qmk.fm/#/.

If the tool doesn’t cover your use case and you are able to do a little C, these sections are good starting points for layers (what you call modes) and cursor keys.

https://docs.qmk.fm/feature_layers

https://docs.qmk.fm/features/mouse_keys

1. Install nix.
2. nix profile install nixpkgs#vscodium
3. nix profile upgrade ‘.*’

Won’t auto update but you could add the upgrade command to a login script or something.

Won’t lie, nix has a high learning curve to get the most out of it, but installing a single app is pretty simple.

Most startups I’ve applied to are Linux friendly.

I currently work for a fortune 100 and managed to get a Linux machine purchased as a “lab” machine.

I’m fully in control. IT doesn’t even know it exists. I’m not allowed on the corporate network, but I managed to get some internal corporate access through another department’s lab network (IT sanctioned) that has a VPN with a few routes to things like ticketing, time cards, and our internal wiki. Most of the stuff I need to do my job is in AWS and we are allowed to add home IPs to the security groups.

IT still gives me a MacBook. I use it like once every 6 months.

nixos-unstable is the only thing I will use currently.

I’m running bleeding edge stuff like the latest kernel, Hyprland nightly, my own “shell” built from Gnome components and lots of custom stuff using GJS (Gnome JavaScript).

If you get one, and you are free to do whatever on it, encrypt your drives like your job depends on it. I have a memorized passphrase, pin protected hardware key, and a key in TPM. No biometrics.

As far as other nice things to have:

• VPN: https://www.infradead.org/openconnect/ supports some common enterprise VPNs.
• Communication tools (Teams, WebEx, Zoom, Slack, etc.). I tend to have access to 90% of what I need. My team is thankfully accommodating for the couple features I have issues with. Make sure you test things like Screen Sharing especially in Wayland if you use it.
• VM: If you can get a corporate licensed image to run a corporate licensed version of Office, I recommend it. Office365 for web is missing a few features and often renders differently from native.
• Password Manager and encrypt everything. System is encrypted as previously stated. My home volume (BTRFS) is encrypted with a different key/passphrase. My work’s sensitive files are encrypted yet again using rclone with different keys. I try to minimize attack surfaces by unlocking only what I need when I need it.
• Backups. I use rclone to backup to our corporate OneDrive. Nixos is immutable and I have it setup with impermanence where every reboot is like a fresh install if I didn’t codify it my nixos-config which is tracked in git. I persist a few cache and setting directories in my home directory, but not much. I can restore my setup in like 20 minutes if I ever lost my machine.
• Virtual mic and camera for noise suppression and blurring for communication tools that don’t have it built in.
• Evolution EWS works okay as an Exchange email client. I had to hunt some weird settings like tenant ID to get it to work. I’ve been using Webmail or Outlook in a VM more often though as of late.

I work in software dev as FYI. For the few issues I have, my team has more issues getting stuff working consistently on macOS for our project. I used that as a justification when requesting the laptop: my dev environment should closely match our runtime environment. Most of that is moot now since we use Nix flakes in our repos for local dev envs.

Looks good to me. Interface to Dest Ports are your match conditions. NAT IP/Port are the translations performed on each packet matched inbound and the Dest.

Traffic going the other way reverses this operation on the Src instead of destination.

That’s an over simplification of NAT, but for basic port forwarding the general principal holds.

Immutable Nixos. My entire server deployment from partitioning to config is stored in git on all my machines.

Every time I boot all runtime changes are “wiped”, which is really just BTRFS subvolume swapping.

Persistence is possible, but I’m forced to deal with it otherwise it will get wiped on boot.

I use LVM for mirrored volumes for local redundancy.

My persisted volumes are backed up automatically to B2 Backblaze using rclone. I don’t backup everything. Stuff I can download again are skipped for example. I don’t have anything currently that requires putting a process in “maint mode” like a database getting corrupt if I backup while its being written to. When I did, I’d either script gracefully shutting down the process or use any export functionality if the process supported it.

I use rclone and the Round Sync Android client.

Supports a ton of back ends, self hosted, and commercial options. You can transparently encrypt with private keys you control.

I personally use B2 Backblaze for storage.

My phone backs up every night and Round Sync pushes them to B2. On my desktop I can mount as a volume. I can also access my storage from my phone going the other direction.

I’ve done the same using SFTP if I don’t want the overhead of persistent file storage.

It does not support indexing or previews for searching or finding say a photo. You can put whatever you want for data. So I have caches, indexes, and thumbnails that work in Linux. I can’t really make use of those on my phone though.

Rclones bisync feature is also a bit dangerous when I tried to use it a year ago. I more than once “deleted” everything. B2 doesn’t delete by default, just hides, so I was able to recover. I now do unidirectional syncs from my machines to different buckets until I’m motivated to investigate a proper 3-way merge solution.

This is news to me. That said, I’m usually one generation behind but upgrade every 2 years as my phone is usually EOL for software updates by the end of the period. I try to time it so I can get a replacement paid outright at mid-range prices.

With the Pixel 8 introducing extended software support, I’ll have to dig more into this.

I’m on Graphene. Mullvad is only 1% for me with 16h30min since last on a charge. I’m at 56% with 1h30m screen time.

I used GPS as I did some driving with maps and my music app accounting for 29% of my battery usage.

I throw my phone on the charger at night figuring battery tech and software management is good enough.

Are you WiFi or mobile? I get shitty mobile service so if I’m off WiFi my battery tends to go to shit. The VPN usually accounts for more as I assume it keeps reconnecting.

I haven’t tested in Windows, but this is my setup Linux to Linux using rclone which the docs say works with Windows.

Server

• LUKS
• LVM
• Volgroup with a mishmash of drives in a mirror configuration
• Cache volume with SSD
• BTRFS /w Snapshots (or ZFS or any other snapshotting FS)
• (optional) Rclone local “remote” with Crypt if you want runtime encryption at rest and the ability to decrypt files on the server. You can skip this and do client side only if you don’t want the decryption key on the server.
• SFTP (or any other self-hosted protocol from https://rclone.org/docs/)

Client

• Rclone Config /w SFTP (or chosen protocol)
• (optional) Rclone Config /w Crypt
• Rclone mount with VFS.

I use this setup for my local files and a similar setup to my Backblaze B2 off site backups.

The VFS implementation has been pretty good. You can also manually sync. Their bisync I don’t fully trust though.

I can access everything through android using https://github.com/newhinton/Round-Sync. Not great for photos though as thumbnails weren’t loading without pulling the whole file last I tested a year ago.

Hotline for the MacOS warez scene to get games in high school (circa 1999ish).

I accidentally pirate crap I have legitimate access to because I can’t be bothered to figure out which damn platform its on. I have access to quite a few through work due to my industry at no out of pocket costs.

The times I try to actually search for something, it’ll be listed on multiple platforms but 0 to 1 of those platforms will actually have what I’m looking for included with the subscription forcing me to manually check each one.

It is easier to just pirate.

And track this stuff in git so you don’t need to remember how you did it when you inevitably forget, lol.

I use Nix, even on my Ubuntu machines, to install tooling in my user profile.

Nixpkgs unstable stays pretty up to date. The few I want something on release day or bleeding edge nightlies, I override the derivation source. I use nvfetcher to pull the latest release or head of the default branch as part of my update routine.

I’m pretty new to Nix, so its been slow integrating into my workflow, but I plan to start integrating flake’s into my repos. My team seems to have constant issues with keeping their tooling up to date which breaks things locally from time to time.

I’m coming from a Haskell/Scala background. This job just pays more. TS has been “good enough” for types. I don’t think I could be as effective without them at this point.

I don’t see it dying from my perspective. Its only been getting better and better. The only thing I could see displacing it in my org is maybe Rust due to WASM proving a transition path.

We use TS on the back end to leverage our teams existing skill set and libraries we’ve built up.

I know it’s a meme to use “the next best thing” in the ecosystem, but we’ve been really happy with the newish Effect library + Bun runtime. Effect is like a merger of the older fp-ts/io-ts libraries (same author works on both) with Zio from the Scala ecosystem. It vastly simplifies the former and the new stuff with dependency injection and defect management is refreshing. With the Bun runtime, we see a 15x faster startup time (great for dev). Its halved the RAM requirements in prod. We don’t even need to transpile… We still do for prod to tree-shake dev-only code to ensure its not available in prod, but deploying to dev is FAST.

One method depends on your storage provider. Rsync may have incremental snapshots, but I haven’t looked because my storage provider has it.

Sometimes a separate tool like rsnapshot (but probably not rsnapshot itself as I dont think its hard links interact well with rsync) might be used to manage snapshots locally that are then rsynced.

On to storage providers or back ends. I use B2 Backblaze configured to never delete. When a file changes it uploads the new version and renames the old version with a timestamp and hides it. Rsync has tools to recover the old file versions or delete any history. Again, it only uploads the changed files so its not full snapshots.

Yes. You compose a crypted vault over your storage vault. I pay about $1/mo for B2 Backblaze. Around 150G last I checked.