geocal
Conkey
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geocal
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Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?
More than I can count, but here are the big ones:
http://moros.cc - A hobby operating system, with a shell, an editor, a lisp interpreter, and many other little things
https://geodate.org - A lunisolar calendar with decimal time (centidays and dimidays)
https://github.com/vinc/geodate - An implementation of the calendar + time
https://github.com/vinc/geocal - A tool to visualize the calendar + time
https://github.com/vinc/littlewing - A chess engine written in Rust (and another one before that in C++)
https://vinc.cc/software/ - A more complete list, on my personal website
I'm good at scratching my own itches but less good at finding projects that could be useful for other people.
Conkey
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Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?
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 âsound change applierâ 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 Iâm pretty sure Iâm still the one who uses them the most!
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I designed my own keyboard layout. Was it worth it?
I made my own crossplatform multilingual layout [0]. Although itâs based on QWERTY, it shouldnât be hard to remap the Linux and Mac versions to any other base layout, since theyâre autogenerated from the Windows version.
[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey
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Ask HN: What are your âscratch own itchâ projects?
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. Iâve also ended up porting Conkey to Mac and Linux â and given that Iâm slowly switching from Windows to Linux, at least the Linux ports have âscratched my own itchâ 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. Itâs proven pretty useful when I want to find something I saw a while ago and then forgot. (I havenât attempted to open-source it, though â 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 havenât had much time for recently. Actually, sound change appliers strike me as being very much a âscratch own itchâ 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
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An accentuated Emacs experiment (Ă la macOS)
For a ~50-year-old program, Emacsâs support for multilingual input â and really, itâs all-round flexibility â continually amazes me! For myself I prefer my own custom keyboard layout [0], because it works outside Emacs too, but Iâd happily use Emacsâs own input methods if that would be sufficient.
(In fairness, I have found one weak spot, namely font support⌠Iâve used âunicode-fontsâ [1] with some success, but reportedly it doesnât work with the latest Emacs. Ah well, itâs at least fairly rare that this becomes a problem in practice.)
[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey
[1] https://github.com/rolandwalker/unicode-fonts
- WinCompose â A Compose Key for Windows
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A Mathematical Keyboard Layout (2018)
To port my keyboard layout [0] to OSX, I used âosxkbâ [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
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The Design of Forms in Government Departments (1962)
> But instead, we're dealing with Latex - a language that overcomplicates the most basic features such as fonts, tables and special characters.
I canât 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.)
What are some alternatives?
kindle_clippings_webapp - Web Application for importing, viewing and tagging kindle clippings. Account is not required.
espanso - Cross-platform Text Expander written in Rust
motion - Motion, a software motion detector. Home page: https://motion-project.github.io/
Scoop-Core - Shovel. Alternative, more advanced, and user-friendly implementation of windows command-line installer scoop.
dataplaneapi - HAProxy Data Plane API
ibus - Intelligent Input Bus for Linux/Unix
Clendar - Clendar - Minimal Calendar app. Written in SwiftUI.
ScienceNotes - Just a keyboard for science notes on a Mac
next-plausible - Simple integration for https://nextjs.org and https://plausible.io analytics
9ime - Plan 9's unicode input method ported to windows
rtpmidid - RTP MIDI (AppleMIDI) daemon for Linux
https-bot - Find http urls that can be safely replaced by https url