Honestly there's not much to say here, but I thought I'd mention a couple of nice tools from suckless.org that I've personally used and enjoyed for quite some time.
## sfeed
This is a small and simple tool set for RSS feeds. The one-liner below will fetch all the configured URLs and build a nice neat HTML page "feeds.html" to view with w3m or lynx.
Note: if you see any backslashes in this one-liner, they are NOT supposed to be there. Apparently some Gemini clients don't render the underscore characters unless I put backslashes before them(looking at _you_, Amfora...)
Each feed has its own section on the page, while new links are always put at the top of their section with their date listed on the left. I've added a bookmark for the feeds.html page to w3m for convenience.
## st
Next is the suckless terminal, a much nicer alternative to xterm with simpler colour customization. This is very useful when building for different machines since the colour rendering of every display I use is different. It's annoying because I have to adjust 20 colours by trial and error until they look right... Setting the default text colour to a warm and sensible shade of white is always the hardest, but I think it's perfect on the T490. Probably the best one yet! Only two patches were applied to this build; one for blinking cursors and one to set the font size with a '-z' flag. On a full HD display (1920x1080), using a geometry of 80x30 with a font size of '-z 22' seems to be ideal, as it's only slightly larger than the 8" IPS display. Of course it lacks the warm and fuzzy character of VGA signals with the horizontal scan artefacts caused by the HDMI cable... Oh how I miss analogue!
Speaking of which, I have tried the cool-retro-term before and was quite a fan of the CRT simulation, but it actually hurt to look at for more than an hour... It also used a lot more memory than st, while the colours were much harder to set correctly.
I don't know if it's st or cwm, but the ALT key works in tmux now, so all is good on the terminal front. I've also added slstatus to the tmux status bar, though perhaps there's too much content in the output. Normally it's not an issue, but since there's a bug in the AML parsing related to the power cord, the battery percentage fails to change unless I suspend the machine. If I plug in the cord while there's a '-' sign in front of the percentage, there's some weird string that follows until the cord is removed. Only then will slstatus display the remaining runtime, but this leaves me with a fairly short space for listing the open panes in tmux. I can only see the first two in this case.
## sic
Normally my presence on the internet is passive, I don't bother with social media anymore. There was once a time when I tried IRC though, so of course there's one more tool to mention. That tool is sic, the "simple IRC client". Last I knew it worked just fine, though it's possible the source I have is old and outdated. If ever there's a need for an IRC client again, I know which one to use.
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