Building my own things

TL;DR I’ve been thinking lately about how I use my computer, and how I can improve my workflow — by building my own stuff.

I wrote about Wesley’s amazing website multiple times in the past. While his writing is amazing, what I like most about his site is the way he built it. He basically wrote a static site generator, with exactly the things he needed, in plain Bash. That’s cool!

And then a while back while reading some blogs, I stumbled upon Linus’ blog. In addition to his blog (which is also very interesting btw), he has also written a whole suit of programs and tools for personal use. Everything from a calendar, to a notes app, to a fricking search engine — all in his own programming language. That’s even cooler!

It was really inspiring to me — I want that. I want to build my own tools. So I made a plan.

The Plan

I want my tools to run in two places:

• On the Unix commandline.
• As lightweight pages on the Web.

I’ve found the perfect tools for the job:

• The rc shell written by Drew DeVault.
• The Oak programming language.

Here’s some things I want to make:

• netcat: A tool that prints the content of a remote resource, similar to cat on your fs. It should cache the response in ~/.cache. If the resource is requested again, it checks whether the last modified date of the cached version is within the last X (let’s say 30) days. If the file has “expired” and there is an internet connection available, ask the server for a new version (with the Last-Modified or ETag headers).

• open: An application opener. Looks at the URL scheme or mime type of the input and checks which application to launch. Falls back to xdg-open if the mime type hasn’t been configured.

And I want to replace Bix with separate tools:

• bix: A tool that basically wraps language-specific tools like npm, cargo, mix. It detects what language you’re using, and the delegates to the corresponding tool. This means one CLI interface that works in every project.

• yo: a simple project manager. It should contain useful scripts for performing commands related to project setup, like creating repositories, pulling ignore files, generating files. Basically most of what bix currently does.

• A Bakefile, which is an improved Makefile.

I’m also planning to write a bunch of Markdown converters:

• md2html: A simple markdown to HTML converter.
• md2gemtext: A simple markdown to gemtext converter.
• md2goph: A simple markdown to gophermap converter.

Together, this should be enough for some bigger projects:

• A rewrite of my personal blog, Wesley-style.

• A RSS reader as SSG, as described in my previous blogpost

• A simple pastebin style app with CLI interface:

  $ cat hello.txt | paste | echo
  https://geheimesite.nl/paste/xxx
  

• My own search engine maybe?

/dream