Conkey VS Scoop

Most of my programs were written for my own use, including:

• A keyboard layout to type numerous non-English letters, punctuation marks and mathematical symbols, originally for Windows but subsequently ported to Linux and Mac [https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey]

• A ‘sound change applier’ for my hobby of language construction, to simulate the process of historical sound change [https://bradrn.com/brassica/]

• A small browser extension to save the full text of all webpages I visit, and a local client to search the database [not open-sourced, apologies!]

The first two have gained a few other users since being released, but I’m pretty sure I’m still the one who uses them the most!

I made my own crossplatform multilingual layout [0]. Although it’s based on QWERTY, it shouldn’t be hard to remap the Linux and Mac versions to any other base layout, since they’re autogenerated from the Windows version.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

The biggest one for me is undoubtedly my custom keyboard layout Conkey [0], which I use constantly (including for typing this very comment). I hate the way the base US layout tends to get distorted in other keyboard layouts with good support for non-ASCII characters, so Conkey had the explicit goal of retaining that basic unshifted layout. I’ve also ended up porting Conkey to Mac and Linux — and given that I’m slowly switching from Windows to Linux, at least the Linux ports have ‘scratched my own itch’ too, which is nice.

Also, I made a utility to archive the full text of every website I view and store it in a SQLite database for searching. It’s proven pretty useful when I want to find something I saw a while ago and then forgot. (I haven’t attempted to open-source it, though — it consists of three entirely separate components, two of which were a pain to set up. I must try to get it into a more usable state one of these days.)

What else… my sound change applier [1], perhaps? Not that I use it very much, because I only need it on those occasions when I want to do some conlanging, which I haven’t had much time for recently. Actually, sound change appliers strike me as being very much a ‘scratch own itch’ type of project in general… sometimes it feels like every conlanger has written their own, and no two can agree on a nice design. Everyone just has their own unique preferred way of doing things.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

[1] https://github.com/bradrn/brassica

For a ~50-year-old program, Emacs’s support for multilingual input — and really, it’s all-round flexibility — continually amazes me! For myself I prefer my own custom keyboard layout [0], because it works outside Emacs too, but I’d happily use Emacs’s own input methods if that would be sufficient.

(In fairness, I have found one weak spot, namely font support… I’ve used ‘unicode-fonts’ [1] with some success, but reportedly it doesn’t work with the latest Emacs. Ah well, it’s at least fairly rare that this becomes a problem in practice.)

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

[1] https://github.com/rolandwalker/unicode-fonts

To port my keyboard layout [0] to OSX, I used ‘osxkb’ [1], which outputs an OSX keyboard layout bundle given a simple textual specification file. It was originally created specifically to port Conkey to OSX, but should be entirely usable for other purposes as well.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

> But instead, we're dealing with Latex - a language that overcomplicates the most basic features such as fonts, tables and special characters.

I can’t really argue with the rest of your post, but in my experience this is incorrect. Fonts and special characters are both trivial if you use XeTeX, and tables, though slightly clumsy, are still pretty easy. As an example, see the documentation I wrote for https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey, which makes extremely heavy use of all three features. (As documentation for a keyboard layout, it uses characters from pretty much every corner of Unicode, and accompanying tables of many shapes and sizes to show how to type these characters; I needed to use Gentium in order to render all these characters, with Times New Roman as a fallback. I found that LaTeX could ably handle all of these complecations.)

Scoop is a command-line installer for Windows, aimed at making it easier for users to manage software installations and maintain a clean system. It's designed with developers and power users in mind but can be beneficial for any Windows user looking for an efficient way to manage software. Basically it makes our life easier when it comes to software installation of any sort. Scoop support installation for large number of software. Check it out here Scoop.

Use a package manager! Assuming Windows (since it's the odd one out), get yourself some scoop then just scoop install openjdk. No need to navigate to a website, download bundleware, click next-next-next and accidentally install a virus like some caveman from 1997. This has been a solved problem since ancient times!

Should be easy enough, I installed neovim on my windows machine with scoop (you can even get nightly if you want), it's basically a one line install. You can also do a manual install if you want, but you don't have to. It took a little fiddling for me because I wanted to install scoop as well as all applications onto my D drive rather than my C drive, but nothing too crazy. I never got NvChad on my windows machine, but I do have it on linux, and siduck (the creator of nvchad) has given good instructions for installing even on windows, so i don't think it should be a problem. Also, there's a discord for nvchad, and siduck is pretty active on there if you want to ask questions. Good luck!

I update it with Brew on macOS and Scoop [1] on Windows (but I guess it is included in other package managers such as chocolatey).

Of course, a built-in auto-updater would be good, but a packaged version is a nice workaround for me.

[1]: https://scoop.sh/

So I tried installing scoop the "normal" way for both users then ran scoop install {app} --global as per https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Scoop/wiki/Global-Installs and got:Cannot find path 'C:\ProgramData\scoop\buckets' because it does not exist

There are a number of ways that you can install the Snyk CLI on your machine, ranging from using the available stand-alone executables to using package managers such as Homebrew for macOS and Scoop for Windows.

Scoop provides a wonderful foundation for creating a portable developer's toolkit on Windows systems.