Chris WellonsInterview
Software engineer
Adapted from Chris Wellons's interview on Uses This, published 4 October 2019. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
I use various Dell computers, including right now as I currently type this on a Latitude 7490.
I also rely significantly on a home server built from an ODROID-C2.
In the past this role had been filled by older Raspberry Pi models, but the ODROID is well-suited as a server.
Communication
I use NeoMutt as my email client.
Productivity
I dislike big desktop environments, so instead I use OpenBox - bare-bones, without any task bar, start menu, etc.
Browser
Firefox is my favorite web browser.
Security
Coding & Development
It lets me comfortably compose all my mail in my favorite text editor, Vim.
The one exception is Emacs, my second favorite text editor, though these days I only use Emacs for extending Emacs.
To manage this setup, I'm nearly always using tmux, a terminal multiplexer.
For the terminal emulator itself I usually use xterm because it's so configurable and featureful.
Media
I use mpv for most media consumption.
Other
Why I like these editors so much is that I spend a significant amount of my time working inside of a terminal emulator connected via SSH to a remote machine.
This is in large part due to Tridactyl, an add-on that makes the interface Vim-like, which makes the interface far more capable.