Web Excursions are select bookmarks from my travels around the interwebs, because I'm always thinking about you while discovering other people's cool stuff. You mean that much to me. You can see all of my (public) bookmarks on Pinboard, and visit the bookmarks archive for curated lists across the last few years.

Web excursions brought to you in partnership with Backblaze. Back up everything.

piotrmurach/tty: Toolkit for developing sleek command line apps.
Toolkit for developing sleek command line utilities with Ruby. The toolkit itself is cool, but the components it includes are awesome and can be used in any project (each one is an individual gem). Great tools for everything from command line progress bars to rendering Markdown in the Terminal.
jorgebucaran/autopair.fish: Auto-complete matching pairs in the Fish command line.
Another useful Fish plugin. It gives you auto-pairing of quotes and braces, intelligently deletes empty pairs, and you can type over closing elements. Just like in your favorite Markdown editors… Also see pisces, which is pretty much the same thing, as far as I can tell.
acomagu/fish-async-prompt: Make your prompt asynchronous to improve the reactivity.
I love the Fish shell. One thing that bugs me but which I kind of just learned to live with is that a prompt with the same amount of shenanigans I ran in Bash or Zsh would take an extra second to display in Fish. I got used to it. But then I found this plugin that makes your prompt command async. It displays the previous prompt immediately, and then updates it in place once your prompt commands (left and right) run. Perfect if you have a custom prompt and don’t want to switch to a prompt package…
IlanCosman/tide: The ultimate Fish prompt.
The fish-async-prompt plugin is excellent if you want to use your own prompt commands, but if you want an easy-to-configure async prompt with all the niceties (git status, ssh context, command execution time, etc.), Tide is a pretty great option. I added the asdf items and I think I’m switching from my convoluted custom prompt setup to this now. I don’t know all the history, but I’m pretty sure this is a port of powerlevel10k.
romkatv/zsh4humans: A turnkey configuration for Zsh
I don’t want zsh users to feel left out. Here’s a turnkey configuration for Zsh that includes great plugins and the same powerlevel10k prompt that Tide for Fish pulls from. Installed zsh4humans on top of oh-my-zsh without any issue, in case you’re wondering.
Descript - All-in-one audio/video editing, as easy as a doc.
I’ve mentioned Descript a bunch of times, but I’m adding it to Web Excursions because they’ve added so many amazing features since the last time I linked it that I really think any podcaster/youtuber/screencaster who’s not using it should check it out again.

Short description: Edit your audio and video by editing the transcription (which it also generates). Select text, hit delete, media file is cleanly edited automatically. Descript now has a full suite of audio plugins (limiter, compressor, hi/lo cut, multiple EQs) as well as some wizardry to boost and level audio without a single dial to fiddle. If you’re spending an hour or more every week editing a show, you really need to see this.

Backblaze securely backs up your entire computer to the cloud, affordably and reliably. I trust it with all my data. Check it out today.