TinyToolSH: Tiny tools to boost your productivity

Gabo and I share a very similar philosophy when it comes to software: small things that do one thing really well. It’s no coincidence we’re fans of the suckless philosophy.

Sometime in 2020 we started writing small shell scripts to automate boring day-to-day tasks. Simple things: a dmenu wrapper for creating Markdown notes, a terminal pomodoro timer, a script that downloads satellite images from GOES and sets them as wallpaper.

Over time these scripts got serious — they got Makefiles, manpages, systemd services, and even changelogs. And then the problem arose: how to organize all of this?

The first repository

It all started at calebe94/tinytools. A single repository with all the scripts inside subdirectories, as if they were modules of one project.

At the time the repo had 295 commits, 8 branches, and 20 open issues. It wasn’t exactly chaotic, but you could already tell some tools had a life of their own. tgoeswall, for instance, was way more complex than the others — it had a config file, a systemd service, control via tgoeswallctrl start|stop, and logging in journalctl. Keeping it in the same repository as a 10-line script was starting to not make much sense.

The name

Here comes the interesting part. We wanted to call the project TinyTools, obviously. The name was perfect: tiny tools, straight to the point.

But when we went to create the organization on GitHub, the username tinytools was already taken. And it wasn’t an active project — it was one of those users who register and vanish.

So we adapted. TinyToolSH — Tiny Tools written in SHell script. The acronym made sense because, well, all the tools are written in shell. Some in Python (like ttodo), but most in pure bash or sh.

Migrating to an organization

Instead of keeping everything in a monolithic repository, we moved each tool to its own repo under the TinyToolSH organization.

Each tool got its own structure:

tgoeswall/
├── tgoeswall          # the main script
├── tgoeswall.conf      # configuration file
├── tgoeswall.service   # systemd unit
├── tgoeswall.1         # manpage
├── Makefile            # install and uninstall
├── CHANGELOG.md
├── LICENSE
└── README.md

This solved several problems at once:

• Each tool has its own release cycle;
• Issues are separated per tool, not one big mess;
• Each one’s Makefile is independent;
• If you only want to use tpomodoro, you don’t need to clone 10 scripts you won’t use.

The tools

Today the organization has 16 repositories, with the main ones being:

Tool	Description
tgoeswall	Downloads images from the GOES satellite and sets them as dynamic wallpaper
tlaunch	dmenu wrapper for creating custom menus
tnotes	Create and access Markdown notes via dmenu
tpomodoro	Pomodoro timer in the terminal
tprogbar	ASCII progress bar generator
tsearch	Search the web however you want
ttodo	Task list via dmenu
tyaml	YAML file parser in pure shell
tmdpres	Markdown presentation generator
tbm	Plain-text URL bookmarks
tmenu	dmenu wrapper for creating menus
tgit	List important git repositories on your system

If you noticed that several tools use dmenu, it’s no coincidence. dmenu is from the suckless project — lightweight, fast, with no absurd dependencies. It’s the most suckless GUI there is for menus on X11.

Installation

All tools follow the same installation pattern. Each has a Makefile you can edit to change the installation prefix (the default is /usr/local/bin).

git clone https://github.com/tinytoolsh/tgoeswall.git
cd tgoeswall
sudo make install

To uninstall:

sudo make uninstall

Simple as that. No package manager, no runtime dependency, no 500MB node_modules.

tgoeswall

The tool I’m most proud of is tgoeswall. The idea came when I saw the dynamic wallpaper from macOS Mojave and thought: “I can do this on Linux, in a cooler way.”

The script downloads an image from GOES-16, NOAA’s geostationary satellite, every 10 minutes, and applies it as wallpaper using feh. The result is your wallpaper changing throughout the day as the Earth rotates.

The image below is served directly from NOAA’s CDN and is updated every 10 minutes — yes, it’s live:

To control tgoeswall as a systemd service:

tgoeswallctrl start   # starts the service
systemctl --user start tgoeswall
systemctl --user stop tgoeswall
journalctl --user -fu tgoeswall   # view the log

You can also download a single image at a specific resolution:

tgoeswall -r 5424

Available resolutions are 678, 1808, 5424, and 10848. Be careful with 10848 — the image can exceed 72MB.

Final thoughts

TinyToolSH is a project that started as a handful of scripts and grew into an organization with 16 repositories. It’s not a project that’s going to take over the world, and that’s exactly the point. Each tool does one thing, does it well, and doesn’t try to do more than that.

If you’re into the Unix philosophy of small tools that work well together, check out the project website and the GitHub.

And if you want to contribute, all tools are under GPL v3.0. There are open issues across several repositories.

See you next time!!!