 Recently, on the channel, I've been noticing a lot more questions regarding the software that I use. People want to know, hey, DT, what window manager are you using in that video? What terminal emulator? What browser do you use? People just want to know what software I use for various tasks. And I can understand that because my YouTube channel now in about a week or so is going to turn three years old. We've actually been doing this for three full years because I started in October of 2017. And I made nearly 800 videos in that time, but almost none of my subscribers have been here from day one. Nobody watched video number one and have been here ever since. Maybe a few of you guys and those of you that have been here for the whole time, I do appreciate that. But most of my subscribers are probably people that just subscribed this year in 2020, you know, probably half of them. And a lot of those people really don't know what I use as far as the applications I use on a regular basis. So today's video is going to be talking about the software that I use. I think the place to start is window managers. The number one question I get is, hey, DT, what's your window manager? What window manager are you using in this video? That video? I will go ahead and tell you guys, I switch window managers a lot when I'm making my videos. I'm not in the same window manager all the time when I make my videos. But if you're asking me typically, what window manager do I use? Those are better than not that I'm going to be in X-Monead. It's kind of always been my favorite window manager. It's just really comfy. It's fast. Of course, the more I learn Haskell, the easier this thing is to config and it's very extensible, very configurable, very powerful. I just love X-Monead. It's a dynamic tiling window manager. I prefer dynamic window managers. So it's got the master and stack layout, which I love. You know, I can just do anything I want in X-Monead and I've got it configured with some really neat extensions like the tree select menu here, which is pretty cool. If I wanted to search through some bookmarks here and launch something I could. I also played with the grid select menu as well. And I actually did videos about both the grid select menu, the tree select menu. I've done a lot of X-Monead videos in the past. So that's typically the one I'm in. If I'm not an X-Monead, if you guys spot me using a window manager that's not X-Monead, it's probably one of three other window managers, Qtile, Awesome, or DWM. Why? It's because all of those are also dynamic tiling window managers and I like dynamic tiling window managers. I don't usually use I3, BSPWM, or HerbsliftWM because those are not dynamic tilers. They have a different kind of workflow. I don't like their workflow. People have also asked me, because I've done videos about them in the past, StumpWM, which is kind of an Emacs-like window manager. I trashed that on video because I couldn't figure the dang thing out. It was very tough to configure StumpWM and get it working right. People have also asked me about EXWM, which is really just an Emacs extension that allows you to turn Emacs into a window manager. Instead of logging into a window manager, really you just log into Emacs and it becomes your window manager. But I don't really use StumpWM or EXWM. I've made a decision that I need to go back and revisit StumpWM at some point because I don't think I gave it a fair shot. The more I become comfortable with Emacs and with programming and Lisp, I think I might be able to get StumpWM to a level where I at least don't hate it, but I'm not sure when I'm going to get back to that. But as far as window managers, chances are that if you're asking me what window manager I'm using at the moment, it's probably Xmoned. Probably the next most common question I get is, what browser do I use? I use multiple web browsers. I've made videos about a lot of web browsers and I think that's why people ask me, hey, are you still using this web browser? Are you still using that web browser? I have five or six different web browsers installed on my main production machine, so yes, most of the videos that I've made about web browsers, yes, I actually still have those web browsers installed on the system and I do occasionally use them. But if you had to pin me down and say, hey, what web browser do you typically use? I typically use Mozilla Firefox. This is the one I typically use. It's just the standard as far as open source web browsers. It's not chromium based, which I like. And Mozilla is one of the largest open source companies out there as far as a company making open source software. So I like supporting them. I like pushing them. But another browser that I do sometimes use, I use the Kube browser. I have the Kube browser. If I'm not using Firefox, I'm probably using the Kube browser, actually. So if I, you know, wanted to do something in the Kube browser, I could. And it's not a bad browser. It's a pretty OK browser, actually. But the problem with the Kube browser is the ad blocking in it. Now, I'm one of these people I don't mind looking at ads as somebody that has made a lot of money from ads, as far as, of course, YouTube videos here in the last three years, but even going way back in the early days of the web, you know, when I was first getting into designing websites and building websites for my own for marketing reasons, you know, putting ads on those websites, you know, there's a lot of people on the web that make a living because of ad revenue. So I don't like blocking ads, typically just browsing the web. But I do need to block ads when I make my videos. Because if I'm making a video and in that video, I open up a web browser and maybe play a YouTube video, I don't want a YouTube ad to play during that video or even worse, because I don't often play other people's videos or even my videos, but I typically do show you guys news articles. And so many of those news sites are just littered with ads. Some of them multimedia ads, you know, with a lot of flashiness and bling to them that is very distracting. So I need a proper ad blocker when I record my videos and using a web browser in my video. So any time you see me using a web browser and a video, typically I'm using Firefox. Now, on my phone, I use Brave. I made a video about the Brave browser. It's a chromium based browser. It's very privacy and security oriented. It blocks a lot of tracking and, you know, nasty stuff like that. And, you know, you can block all your JavaScript stuff. And on the desktop, I'm not that concerned with that stuff. And that's why I still use Firefox. Plus I can do a lot of that stuff in Firefox, too. But on my mobile phone, my Android device, Brave is my browser on my phone. It's been the browser on my phone since I made my video about the Brave browser for the desktop. I installed their mobile app because I don't want to use Google Chrome on my Android phone. I just don't trust it. I think in that situation, Brave makes a lot of sense. So and I've been happy with it as a mobile web browser. It might be something you guys should check out as well. People often ask me about email clients kind of like I've been using Mozilla Firefox since the early, early days since Mozilla first started. I've been a Thunderbird user since the beginning as well. Although there are other graphical email clients that are really nice. Geary is another one that I've used a lot here in the last year or two. And it's got a really clean interface, simple interface. It's nice looking, but Thunderbird is kind of a standard. It's cross platform, of course, because you can use it on Windows and on Linux. In terminal based email clients, I have used NeoMut a lot in years past. And it's OK. It can be a chore to set up. But it says somebody that's used it a lot over the years. I've gotten the hang of setting up NeoMut. But here recently, and this is going to be a recurring theme because of getting really into Emacs. So many of my daily applications now have just been replaced by Emacs. And that's kind of what is going on with my email client, because now really my email client is simply Emacs because I just launch MU4E, which is the email client inside Emacs here and get into my inbox here for my email here and I could read, I don't know, I could read this Mastodon post that somebody mentioned me and I don't know. Hopefully it's nothing crazy in that it doesn't look like there is. But anyway, MU4E is a Emacs email client and it's just fantastic. It's really so much better than NeoMut. If you're using Emacs, you should just use MU4E for your email client. There's really no need to even explore any other options. And since I brought up Emacs, people keep asking me, what text editor do you really use? Because I see you use Emacs in a video the next day. I see you use Vim in a video. I use both. Typically, I use Emacs. Any time I'm going to spend some serious time in a text editor, like a lot of time doing something like, say, configuring a window manager and it's a window manager that I haven't used before, played around with much. And I'm going to be working in this thing for a while. I'm pulling up Emacs for that. So that's always what I any time if I was going to do any kind of creative writing or something like that. I'm going to pull up Emacs to do that. But if I'm in a terminal and I'm often playing around in the terminal, I do a lot of my file management in the terminal. You just CD around in the terminal and do what you need to do. And if I just need to do a quick edit of something, a quick edit of some configuration file, something in the slash Etsy directory or maybe I want to make a quick edit to my Bash RC or something like that. Yeah, just do it in Vim. I'm already in the terminal. Why not? Why launch Emacs for that? Now, Emacs is always running on my system because I run the Emacs daemon. You know, all my Emacs windows are actually just client windows. There's always an Emacs server running. So I could just launch Emacs, but then I'd have the terminal windows still open. And then I'd have Emacs open where if I just launch Vim, of course, the terminal window goes away. Well, it didn't go away, but Vim is running inside the terminal window. It's just a cleaner, easier way to get something done rather quickly. Now, I mentioned I do a lot of my file management in the terminal, and that is true. But people want to know about file managers. Well, the terminal is my file manager for the most part. I rarely need to open a file manager these days. I just do everything in the terminal. But there are situations where I need a proper file manager. And if I need a graphical file manager, the one I typically install and use is PC Manifium because it's like minimal is not a lot of dependencies with it. And it just works especially with standalone window managers, which is all I use. You know, all my tiling window managers or even floating window managers, like Openbox, Fluxbox, things like that. PC Manifium just makes perfect sense. I wouldn't use anything else as far as a GUI file manager. I mean, Thunar, I guess, is OK. But things like Nautilus and Dolphin, people ask me, hey, why do you have a problem with GNOME's Nautilus file manager? Well, at least back in the day, Nautilus had some dependencies and it also took over your desktop, like it determined whether icons could be placed on the desktop and had some other things that were tied into it more than what I wanted a file manager to be. I just need a file manager to be a file manager. So that's why you typically don't see people using GNOME's Nautilus file manager on a standalone window manager. Dolphin is a great file manager, KDE's file manager, but it has a lot of KDE dependencies. No one would install Dolphin unless they were running KDE. So that's why PC Manifium is just the best choice. Some people have asked me about terminal file managers. I have used a lot of VIFM in the past. It is a great terminal file manager. It's really nice. I mean, I like it. I've got the image previews working here in Ubersug. I mean, I mean, it's got a lot of VIM navigation stuff, you know, HJKL and bookmarks. I could GH to go home, meaning the home directory, Gigi to go to the top of this document, which is really just the top of the file manager. And if I want to do it, I could even colon Q to quit. So that's VIFM. It is a nice terminal based file manager. But typically I just do things in the terminal. A PC Manifium I use sometimes because sometimes I have to have a graphical file manager, because sometimes I like to be able to go and drag programs from my file manager into another program. I often do this when I start doing video editing and audio editing. I'm dragging all these video clips that I just recorded indicate in live. And I can do that with PC Manifium. I can't really do that with a terminal based file manager. So that's why I have both PC Manifium and VIFM on the system. But unless I really need to be able to drag and drop files into a file manager these days, again, what I typically use for a file manager is Emacs. I just use the built in directory editor inside Emacs. So typically I even have it hotkeyed just to go straight to the directory editor inside Emacs. This is my home directory in Dear Ed in Emacs. And yeah, that's kind of what I've replaced VIFM with. That's kind of what I'm doing these days. And it makes sense because typically if I'm in a file manager, I'm probably looking for some kind of file, some kind of document to edit anyway. Emacs is my preferred editor, so Dear Ed is where it's at. For those of you that want to know about the programs I use to make my videos, because a lot of you guys are aspiring to start your own YouTube channel and do some creative stuff with video. So every video I make, I record using a piece of software called OBS, the open broadcaster software. It's free and open source software. It's pretty much the gold standard. Everybody uses OBS pretty much. OBS is almost always the program people use to live stream on things like YouTube, Twitch and other platforms, but even not live streaming. I just do pre-recorded content and I record it all in OBS. It is the thing that allows me to switch scenes like switching to my desktop here. Or later, I'm going to think my patrons and I'm going to show these screens in that screen and the end screen. And this is all done with OBS, the open broadcaster software. I edit my audio if I need to edit my audio in audacity. I do all of my video editing using a program called Kaden Live. And I've done some videos on Kaden Live in the past. Check those out if you need help getting started with Kaden Live. There is a little bit of a high barrier to entry with Kaden Live. It's not that intuitive when you first get into it. I do all of my channel artwork and everything, my thumbnails. I do that in GIMP and I made a video about that in the past as well, how I create my thumbnails using GIMP as far as just using my computer. You know, what video player do I use? What audio player do I use? Well, my video player is MPV and it's just standard MPV. I do have VOC also installed on the system just in case. And I have that for specialized reasons, really, because sometimes I want to be able to switch audio tracks on something, you know, only listen to track one or track two, you know, on a multi track recording. And VOC makes that really easy where it's, you know, MPV is a lot more minimal by design. My audio player of choice, my music player is a GUI program called Dead Beef. But once again, because of Emacs, Emacs has some plugins that you can install that are audio players, music players. And the one I've been using in Emacs is one called E-M-M-S, the Emacs multimedia system. And that's kind of replaced a lot of my music players. The next category of software people ask me about all the time is terminal emulators because I've made so many videos about different terminal emulators. And right now my terminal emulator is Alacrity, that's the one I typically use. So if I just do Super Enter here in X-Monad, this is the Alacrity terminal, it's just really nice and it's fast. It's very easy to configure. It's a perfect terminal emulator. I love it. In the past, I have used things like X-Term and URX-VT and Termite and ST, all really good terminal emulators. As a matter of fact, I think I probably have all or at least most of them installed on my system right now. I know I have X-Term on the system. I usually install X-Term as a backup terminal emulator anyway, because sometimes I install window managers, especially window managers that I've never used before, and sometimes hard coded in their key bindings is the ability to bring up an X-Term. So it's nice just to have X-Term on the system anyway. ST, I know I have my own build of ST on my GitLab page. I also have my own build of ST hosted in the AUR if you guys want to check it out. But again, kind of like everything else, you know, Emacs. I actually could just open up a terminal in Emacs. This is the V-Term in Emacs. And, you know, it's like any other terminal emulator. If I do an LS, you know, it's as good as any other terminal emulator. The only thing is when I close it, it's asking me, do I absolutely want to close it? I probably could edit that or configure that in such a way that it wouldn't ask me that kind of safety question. But in Emacs, I have both the E-Shell and V-Term. So I have two different terminal emulators, if you will, inside Emacs that I can use. And I use those more and more. They've kind of replaced Alacrity to a degree. And along the same lines, people often ask me, regardless of what terminal emulator I'm running, hey, what shell are you running? Well, I'm running Bash by default these days. Why? It's just Bash is OK. Right? Bash has kind of been the standard. I like Bash, but I have ZSH installed on the system. If I type ZSH here, we'll switch over to the ZSH shell. It looks like I got some errors or something. It's expecting the power level 10 K ZSH theme to be installed on my system. It's not. But that's OK. But this is the ZSH prompt, just a standard ZSH prompt. You know, there's no oh my ZSH going on here. Although if you wanted to, you could really pimp out ZSH with the oh my ZSH plugins. And of course, I have Fish also installed on the system. This is just a default Fish prompt. I haven't configured it in any way. But you can use the oh my Fish plugin system with the Fish shell to do some customization. But for most people, probably Bash is OK. If you do a lot in the shell, as far as interactive stuff with the shell, do some interactive scripting on the fly at the command line, it might be worth it to switch to Fish because Fish does make a lot of improvements like Fish is really what a shell should be. The problem with Fish is it's not POSIX compliant, where Bash and ZSH are pretty much POSIX compliant. They're not really POSIX compliant, but they're close enough where Fish, you can't just switch Fish over to being your systems default shell. It typically breaks things out. That was my experience when I tried it anyway. I also have the new shell installed on my system as well. It is a power shell kind of clone. It's not really a power shell clone, but it's very similar to power shell and look and feel. People often ask me about colors and theming and fonts and things like that. And these things change a lot. So depending on what video you watch, it could be one thing, it could be another. But here in the last year or so, chances are the color schemes that you saw me using, if it was a terminal color scheme or an EMAX color scheme, was pill night. But I have recently switched color schemes. This is no longer the pill night color scheme. This is actually if I launch EMAX here, I am using the standard theme from DOOM EMAX. DOOM EMAX, the default theme is DOOM 1. Let me find that. Yeah, the DOOM theme is called DOOM 1. And I just went ahead and adapted the DOOM 1 theme over to my terminal color scheme and I'm going to adapt it to my X-MODE bar panel here in X-MODE and I'm just, you know, that's something I've been doing here in the last couple of weeks, playing around with the color scheme. I've been using pill night forever and I thought it was time for a change. And I thought the DOOM 1 theme, the default theme in DOOM EMAX really looked good. And I was like, wait, let me see if I can adapt that to be my colors in everything. And it's something that's a work in progress. As far as fonts, the terminal fonts, the monospace fonts that I've been using for much of the past year have been mononokie, although recently I decided to switch fonts. Let me open up EMAX again and get back into that config file. The fonts I'm using right now are Sauce Code Pro. I'm using the Sauce Code Pro Nerd font and it looks really good. It's very clean, very readable. I did a video about my favorite monospace fonts a little while back too. So you guys should check that out. Some other miscellaneous software people have asked about recently Pass, which is a password manager. It's kind of like the standard Unix password manager. Yes, I still use that. I use Pass and I use Pass Menu. If I'm in a window manager that's not X-Monad, in X-Monad, there's actually Pass Menu built into it if you add a specific module. And I'll show you that if I do this key combination here, you know, I can search for, I don't know, my SSH password, right? And that's Pass Menu basically built into X-Monad. The last thing I want to mention is hypervisors, virtual machines, because I've been getting a lot of people asking me about Virtual Box and VIRT Manager. Do I actually use both? Do I prefer one over the other? I typically use VIRT Manager. I made a video about VIRT Manager a little while back and I do like VIRT Manager. Sometimes I do use Virtual Box on video, depending on what I'm doing, because I have found some operating systems, some Linux distributions, work better in Virtual Box rather than VIRT Manager and vice versa. The other thing is sometimes if I'm doing a video specifically geared toward new Linux users, I know they're probably still running Windows and I want to show them how to install Linux in a VM to test Linux out. I'm going to show them how to do that in Virtual Box. Why? Virtual Box runs on Windows. It also runs on Mac and it also runs on Linux. VIRT Manager, though, is KVM. It's the kernel virtual machine. It only runs on Linux. So it doesn't make sense for me to do a video that's mainly geared toward people that are probably still using Windows and then show them how to do something in VIRT Manager. They're not going to be able to do it. So in that case, I'm going to use Virtual Box. So I think that's it for this rather lengthy rant video. Although I understand why so many people ask these kinds of questions about the software I use, when I look back at the videos I've made, I've demonstrated so many different window managers and web browsers and text editors and file managers and terminal emulators and things on my channel. It's very easy for people to be confused about the software I use, because I can't possibly use all of that software I've shown on my videos. And you're right. So I understand why some of you guys really just want to get me in a corner and pin me down and like, hey, D.D., what browser do you really use? So I hope this video here at least answered some of your questions. Before I go, I need to thank a few special people, though. I need to thank the producers of this show. I need to thank Michael, Gabe, Corbinion, Mitchell, Devin, Fran, Arch 5530, Akami, Chuck, Claudio, Donnie, Dylan, George, Caleb, Devils, Louis, Paul, Scott, and Willie. They are my highest tier patrons over on Patreon. They are the producers of this episode. I also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. All these names you see on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because this channel is supported by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, please consider doing so. Look for DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace.