TGRO's Favoured Applications
What does The Great Radar Oven use to get stuff done?

While I don't play a lot of games, there certainly are a few that I admit spending more than a reasonable amount of time on.

The frame-buffer allows the console to draw graphics in Linux. Technically, it isn't text-based or TUI, but I am willing to give it a pass as it is console-based.

The Friendly, Interactive Shell is an alternative shell to the de-facto standard, BASH (Borne-Again Shell). It adds colour, completions and abbreviations (not the same as aliases), as well as a better scripting language. This makes general shell tasks much faster. The console may attain similar functionality by using another popular shell, Zsh. I prefer Fish as it requires no setup (and has a much better name).

An almost-universal file converter, Pandoc has become an invaluable tool for making readable documents from unreasonable amount of metadata. As Pandoc can convert between such a large amount of formats, I would recommend using this as a good alternative to Org-mode if you are not an Emacs user (and even if you are an Emacs user).

Connecting to WiFi in the console can be slow and feels clunky; luckily there are programs to manage this process. One of the simpler tools is Wifish, a collection of scripts that make connecting easy. An interactive menu is available if you have the dialog utility installed. If you try and use the menu without this then you get my favourite error message of all time: "* Dude, you can't have a menu without the 'dialog' utility (yet) …".

Most command line e-mail clients take a lot of setup which, though something that I am familiar with, can still be finicky and annoying; particularly when your providers are G-Mail (from when I was young and naive), MS Outlook (for school, against my will), and Proton Mail (for me). Proton Mail does not offer free IMAP or POP3 access in the interests of security, and Outlook and G-Mail are annoyingly silent on some of the finer details. Alpine solves all of that, while still giving me all the functionality that I need to break it (if I want). I set up my G-Mail account in Alpine in less than 5 minutes (using this guide) and I have not looked back since.

Someone might hold the opinion that I should use an Emacs interfacing mail client. I will detail this more in future, but one UNIX philosophy is: "A program does one thing and do it well". Emacs dodges this by being more of a platform over a pure editor. Nevertheless, I prefer my Emacs setup to edit text and do so well. Alpine satisfies me with an option set to call Emacs for the e-mail writing; I have 5 TTYs set up, and rarely even log in to them all. I make exceptions for browsers as it is far easier to copy text into Emacs from Emacs.

This is Emacs' native web browser. It has no support for JS, CSS but I quite like how EWW displays lists and that it is probably the fastest browser out. I use it in conjunction with org-preview-html-mode to give me a quick look at how the document is coming along (though I do this by mapping org-preview-html/html to C-c-p).

This is the mode that gives Emacs all the functionality of a word processor (and more!). Technically, Org-mode started life as a clone of outline-mode with some minor visual tweaks and better default keybindings. Nowadays it can handle everything from organising your life with to-do lists (org-agenda) to generating websites with styling, images, code and mathematics. This is all performed using a minimalist markup syntax.

I make this site using Org-mode, proceed the obligatory images of this page in Emacs:

If you aren't an Emacs user but you want to reap the benefits of life in plain text then I would recommend using Markdown (more specifically, Pandoc markdown or R markdown), AsciiDoc, or ReStructured Text (ReST).

As some may know, I use Erlang when I need to do a bit of programming. In my opinion, the Emacs major mode for Erlang provides the best IDE-like experience. It interfaces well to Erl, the Erlang VM, and the syntax highlighting is to your liking (though it is easy to change if not to yours). I keep the default keyboard shortcuts for compiling and running (C-c-p).

Erlang-mode's ability to automatically type out parts of Erlang's structure electrically makes it a joy to work with.

(N.B. 'electricity' in this case refers to a context-sensitive adjustment of the text. Look out for Electric-Pair minor mode later on)

Described as a coffee-break rogue-like, Roguel-ike is a simple game that I use to de-stress when trying to debug the occasional cryptic Elisp error message.

Some highly recommended minor modes to make Emacs life that little bit easier.

• Save-Place-Mode Returns the cursor to the same place in the file you left it. This is especially useful for larger files. For some reason, I could never get this to enable in the menu when I started using Emacs; instead, I recommend putting (save-place-mode 1) into your init file.
• Electric-Pair-Mode Automatically places a right parenthesis after a left parenthesis. This is helpful when editing Lisp files, and for preventing the infuriating un-closed brackets and speech marks that I seem to see more and more.
• Show-Paren-Mode Highlights the complementary parenthesis to the one under the cursor. Again, this is useful for Lisp programming and everyday use.

• Aggressive-Indent-Mode/Org-Indent-Mode When editing plain text in Emacs, one finds themselves making good use of the tab key for indentation. However, Org-mode requires the use of the tab key for folding; plus it gets tedious. These modes automatically indent. The former automatically inserts spaces into the file to create a margin.

  The latter cleverly adjusts visual elements to give the buffer a 'false' margin. Lines wrap to the right point, and excess headline asterisks don't show. I alternate between these modes depending on what I am editing and what mood I am in.

• Aggressive-Fill-Mode Paragraph 'filling' is a method of wrapping a paragraph before the end of the window using 'hard line breaks'. This mode inserts returns after each line and will automatically adjust them whenever the paragraph changes. It is like Auto-fill mode but, well, aggressive. I used this for everything and still occasionally do now.
• Visual-Line-Mode Has the same effect as Aggressive-Fill-Mode but doesn't insert any breaks. It therefore handles buffer resizing much better. It also maintains the ability to truncate lines below a certain buffer width.
• Flyspell-Mode An on-the-fly spellchecker, hence the name! This is inherently useful for writing human-articles in Emacs. I would recommend hunspell over ispell for least hair-tearing. UK users may have to download the Hunspell English GB -ise dictionary, if not included or available in the package manager. I ended up getting them working by chucking them into /usr/share/myspell/, renaming them to en_GB.* and then changing permissions with # chmod 755 en_GB.*. There may be a better way to do this.

• Display-Time-Mode This little mode simply puts a little clock in the information bar at the bottom of each buffer. This is only really necessary if you are running Emacs in a command line: You don't have the system clock displayed in the corner of the screen.

  By default, this also displays a mail alert and system-load indicator. I disabled these by putting this into my init.el

  (setq display-time-mail-file 0) ;means 'don\'t check for mail'
  (setq display-time-default-load-average nil)
  

• Column-Number-Mode Self-explanatory; this mode places the column number next to the line number in the info-bar. Comes in handy when darting quickly around the buffer.
• WriteGood-Mode/ArtBollocks-Mode My writing has a chronic overuse of the passive voice and emphasis words like 'very'. This can make sentences confusing to read, especially for people for whom English might not be a fluent language. Plus, it makes my writing annoying to read through. Writegood-mode highlights when I use emphasis or passive voice, as well as duplicated words.

A well-rounded 2D Computer Aided Design (CAD) package with controls that, while not immediately obvious, quickly become second nature. A particularly good LibreCAD feature is the command interface that allows some very powerful behaviour, such as drawing multiple lines with one command rather than manually making them with a mouse. If you are familiar with such a tool, it feels very much like a 2D revamped CATIA V4, or a much, much better 2D Design clone. That software made me want to vomit.

If you would prefer a free 3D package then I would recommend using FreeCAD. I only have a little experience with this, but it is a nice, parametric, CAD package with a good little tutorial.

Possibly the most-famous free and open-source office suite, LibreOffice can fulfil almost all Microsoft Office needs. LibreOffice Writer (word processor) tries to support Microsoft Word formats as best as it can, but it can't work miracles: Sometimes things break. Use RTF or ODF instead. If you start using LibreOffice then I would recommend you take a look at some of the plugins.

LibreOffice also includes tools for producing and handling slideshows, diagramming, spreadsheets, databases, and mathematical equations.

LibreOffice is not going to be the power tool that takes you to the next level and I don't use it much myself anymore, but it usually works and will feel familiar to the Word transition-er.

You may notice a tool not really covered by LibreOffice, MS Publisher. Publisher, while bloated and closed source (not to mention expensive), worked pretty well and didn't keep trying to move around pictures without asking like Word does.

Scribus is ten times better. It is a more professional tool but feels intuitive and easy to learn. Documentation can be a little strange but is OK, and like most open source packages, is more customise-able than its closed peers.

LibreOffice on a Pi can be slow. AbiWord is not. This is a very light word processor that does not let you mess around in too many options but gives you all the modern features that you would most likely use on the daily.

A well-known, well-used drawing package. Inkscape can be confusing, I am no designer and I have little experience of similar tools. I assume it is easy to get used to. People seem to have good things to say about Inkscape and the online community are active, helpful and vocal.

I used Inkscape to fill in the tgro.neocities.org button with colour and gradients, as LibreCAD only has rudimentary colour support (and rightly so).