Hello all! Today we have a TUI Signal client, and an interesting mechanic of medieval power projection.

Tool of the Week: Gurk

I'm a huge fan of Signal and its highly security-conscious approach to communication. And admittedly, 90% of the time I use the mobile or desktop apps. But sometimes, you just don't want to climb out of the terminal -- and that's when you use gurk-rs.

Hi everyone! Today we have a music player for the terminal, and the largest revolution in human history.

Tool of the Week: Kew

Kew is a recent addition to my toolbox. I love listening to music while I work or draw, and as streaming services have gotten shittier, I've returned to buying my own music and storing it all in a ~/media folder locally (with Syncthing to sync to my other devices, but that's a topic for another time).

Today we introduce the patch notes, your weekly delivery of short, interesting tidbits each Friday between longform essays. Those essays ("features" -- see what I did there?) will be delivered on the last Friday of every month. Normally that would be today, but that feature came out last week instead.

Tool of the Week: Lazygit

Lazygit, my favorite Git interface of all time. I paid $70 for a Tower license and I still switched to this. Lazygit gives you a clear, easily navigable interface for looking at a repo, viewing commits, looking at diffs, resolving merge conflicts, and doing basically everything you can do in git. Bonus tip: once you've pushed a branch in the branches panel, hit o to jump to its PR in your default browser, or open a new one if a PR doesn't exist yet.

Fiat Money is a kind of money that directly tokenizes a threat of violence from the state, and in doing so creates an organic system of coercion against the state's victims.

All modern money can be used in this way, and modern currencies usually have some aspect of fiat to them. However, in much of the world and for most of history, money has been a simpler kind of "commodity money" (inherently valuable: gold, silver, cacao, axe heads). The kind of thing that a traveling merchant would be happy to accept as payment, because everywhere there are humans, gold is gold, and silver is silver, and axe heads cut wood.

Fiat money, by contrast, only has value in the context of a state (or other large scale power structure, as we'll see below). It is perhaps best explained by Warren Mosler:

This week we discuss Pyroclear, the most metal way to clear your terminal; the half-life of European noble families; and a look at perverse incentives and how they work.

Tool of the week: Pyroclear

I'm a heavy user of the "spaces" feature on Mac, and lately half of them have a terminal instance running fullscreen -- one for work, one for creative projects, and so on.

This week, we're going to discuss Dispositio, a tool I made for project planning in the terminal; a timely quote by Mika Waltari; and an essay about how North American languages are constructed fundamentally differently from Eurasian ones, and what that means.

Tool of the Week: Dispositio

One of my own! And since I just made a fancy new home page for it, I thought it might be a good time to share:

This week, we're going to discuss Glow, a beautiful tool for reading markdown documentation in the terminal, the curious case of eyeball planets in nearby solar systems, and the ways in which widespread LLM usage are likely to lead to programmatic stagnation.

TUI of the Week: Glow.

Made with BubbleTea (the same Go framework I used for GoGo, Furnace, and Dispositio), Glow is a beautiful TUI for browsing markdown documentation.

You simply run the tool in e.g. a Github repo, and instantly get a list of all of the markdown files in the repo, searchable, well formatted, and easy to browse. Excellent for reading documentation or just browsing through your Obsidian vault.

What's up! This week, we have a "Go in Go" project I'm working on, a strange terminal-based game platform, a fact about a place it was once possible to stand in dry air four kilometers below sea level, and a discussion about Conway's Game of Life and emergent systems.

Working on: This week, I built out a small client for playing online Go via OGS. In Go, naturally.

It's called GoGo, and you can find it on Github. If you're on Mac, you can also easily try it out via Homebrew:

Hi there! This week, we have a tool (for you terminal users), a fact about whale sharks, and a discussion about logical systems as the artistic core of the games medium. Hope you enjoy!

Tool of the Week: arttime.

95% of my professional life is spent in the terminal -- I'm writing this post in Neovim as we speak, in fact. I always keep a Mac desktop space dedicated to a full screen terminal with different panels going (music, an active game of go, etc). One of these is always arttime. I use it to run pomodoros or even just timebox a goal when I'm juggling too many projects (which is always). The start of my work day involves cycling through its rich library of ASCII art until I find something fun, typing my first task (with m), then hitting g to set a time limit. An OS alert pops when it goes off. Even when I'm not using the timer, seeing the art in my otherwise work-centric terminal panels gives me a little bump of happiness.

Hi,

Thanks for subscribing. I'm Tim Raveling, and this is the email side of The Systemist. Welcome!

I'll be sending weekly letters, with interesting information, useful tools, and systems thinking about various aspects of the world we live in.

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