Repo Roundup #1

This week’s repositories are pretty varied and are mostly about workflow.

Repositories

AeroSpace

Over the past 10 years or so I have used many different window managers. I really like the idea of them, but I haven’t stuck with any for longer than about a year. Typically, I always end up going back to using tools like Rectangle or Raycast’s Window Management commands, which allow me to manually place windows in locations on the fly.

I’ve been trying AeroSpace for a month or two now, and I’ve found that I really enjoy it and get less frustrated with it than I have with similar tools in the past. I like its’ modal nature which lets me create layers of keyboard shortcuts by grouping them into modes that I can switch into.

One thing I’ve done differently this time around, also, that isn’t specific to AeroSpace is setting up some common commands as shortcuts on my StreamDeck.

haystack-editor

I’ve had an idea for a few years to create something similar: an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) informed editor. The primary goal was to shift the editing experience away from changing files and focus on modifying pieces of code, regardless of their layout within files.

Although I hadn’t fully developed this concept, it’s exciting to see someone else exploring this idea. I’m not likely to switch to using this editor but it is an interesting playground for me to continue thinking about these kinds of ideas.

blockbench

This is a surprisingly well-featured low poly 3D model editor that is open source and pretty easy to use. I have had a lot of fun recently using this to make silly things to add to my sons’ Minecraft games.

Considering I had no experience with creating assets for video games I was still able to quickly get some things working with this which was very cool and a great opportunity to show my kids what I do (software engineering) in a way that was tangible for six year olds.

dua-cli

When you play around with self-hosting AI models as much as I do you quickly learn that models can be very large downloads. For performance reasons you want to keep them on your fastest storage which is often your smallest storage. So, again like me, you find yourself very low on available space and need to figure out where you can reclaim some.

In the past I’ve used a macOS app called DaisyDisk for this but I was recently delighted to find this open source TUI tool which is extremely fast and easy to use for exactly this purpose.

meow

As I’m working on the backend personal knowledge base portion of my website I am writing a lot of small Unix-style scripts to be executed with Bun. This library has been very nice to quickly and easily have a robust CLI for my scripts even though it’s possibly “overkill” for my purposes.

This is the best kind of tooling: tooling which makes doing the right thing also the easy thing.