simplecd
Conkey
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simplecd
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Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?
I'm pretty sure that to this day, I am its only user, but it's fascinating how a relatively simple bash-based continuous delivery script can power the build & deploy pipelines of some quite complex and large-ish projects of mine: https://github.com/manuelkiessling/simplecd/
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Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?
I needed a no-fuzz, lightweight Continuous Delivery setup, and wrote https://github.com/manuelkiessling/simplecd.
It’s a single bash script.
To this day, I use to deploy all my projects, including my work projects, no matter what tech stack I use, with great success.
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Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?
I find most Continuous Delivery tools/services overkill most of the time, so I wrote (and heavily use, even in enterprise setups) my own tool „SimpleCD“, which is just a single Bash script, but is extremely powerful and flexible: https://github.com/manuelkiessling/simplecd
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 ‘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!
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I designed my own keyboard layout. Was it worth it?
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
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Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” 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. 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
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An accentuated Emacs experiment (à la macOS)
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
- WinCompose – A Compose Key for Windows
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A Mathematical Keyboard Layout (2018)
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
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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 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.)
What are some alternatives?
FeedTheMonkey - Desktop client for the TinyTinyRSS feed reader.
espanso - Cross-platform Text Expander written in Rust
leapp - Leapp is the DevTool to access your cloud
Scoop-Core - Shovel. Alternative, more advanced, and user-friendly implementation of windows command-line installer scoop.
sunburn.nvim - A Neovim colorscheme emphasizing readability above all else.
ibus - Intelligent Input Bus for Linux/Unix
files_reader
ScienceNotes - Just a keyboard for science notes on a Mac
GoJS, a JavaScript Library for HTML Diagrams - JavaScript diagramming library for interactive flowcharts, org charts, design tools, planning tools, visual languages.
9ime - Plan 9's unicode input method ported to windows
null - Nullable Go types that can be marshalled/unmarshalled to/from JSON.
https-bot - Find http urls that can be safely replaced by https url