My try at this. It's always interesting to learn what kind of people make these smolwab places, so I thought I might contribute a bit as well.
Soooo... I'm a student of computer sciences in Europe. I use *nix. I like minimalism. I like my terminal and get scared of complex graphical UI.
Yea, very unexpected, I know. I didn't say that my contribution will be anything great.
I came here on ^C to socialize a bit and I am failing at it miserably. You can catch me on IRC from time to time, so feel free to reach out if you feel like it.
I have some very specific and sometimes unusual opinions on mostly technical things that I might write about here sometimes once I feel about it.
OS : Fedora
Not rolling. Not super stable. Not Ubuntu.
terminal : kitty
It has it's own image protocol and supports ligatures.
terminal font : FiraCode Nerd Font
terminal multiplexer : tmux
shell : fish
editor : neovim
With some plugins of course. Lspconfig for LSP (I actually don't use LSPs right now). Treesitter for extra highlight (I like colors in my terminal). Rainbow-delimiters for even more colors. Telescope for file management. Auto-pairs and commentary for convenience. Cmp for compleations. Lualine for looks. Parinfer and vlime for lisp. CopilotChat for AI.
Here on ^C I have a more minimal version of this config without plugins that can be found here.
window manager : cwm
very minimal. It's actually developed for OpenBSD, but can be obtained elswhere just fine. I don't really want much features from a WM. Groupes instead of desktops are nice, but I rarely open that much windows, let alone non-maximised. I use xbindkeys for key bindings and feh to set wallpaper. I don't like docks, but I do have some info in tmux bar.
I don't to tiling, since the only application which would make sense to tile with my screen resolution is the terminal, and I have tmux for that. I like how you don't get distracted by theming, since there is nothing to theme.
Highly recommend if you know at least some *nix and like minimalism, highly discourage if you don't.
web browser : brave
gemini browser : amfora
IRC client : hexchat? (weechat is broken for some reason...)
I don't really use that much software to be honest.
FORTH
Very nice low-level language. I still don't know all the secrets, but I'm getting the hang of it. If you are looking for a FORTH implementation with C bindings that actually works (unlike Gforth), I have made ex:forth
Zig
Minimal. Pretty syntax. Nice namespaced imports. Perfect C compatibility. Very nice exception handeling. Highly recommend.
D
Great for string/array manipulations. Does not force OOP. Nice alternative method-like function syntax.
Pascal
You might be surprised, you might disagree even, but I think that Pascal is actually very nice language. It has some similarities with C, as they both originate from the ALGOL family, but it has it's own way of doing things. It is vay more high-level that C, but it still lacks many more modern features, like FP for example. Due to this, it feels more minimal and streamlined compared to many modern languages, without sacrificing convenience, which I like.
ruby
Great for scripting. Love the builtin regex. Love .each syntax. Love chaining methods.
C
I take Zig over C every day, but hey, how can you not like C?