It sounds like you have something that works for you, and that’s great! But I don’t think it’s accurate to pigeonhole this other approach as being “for minimalists.” I’ve used KISS Launcher for a long time and I don’t think of it as especially clean or minimalist. It’s a powerful and flexible way to launch pretty much anything.

I too have built a muscle memory, and mine is tapping a few letters to filter through apps and launch the one I want. The same approach works when finding a contact in KISS. And from the same box I can also launch a web search with my default search engine, or enter a URL to visit directly in my browser. Where things get a little nuts is that this same search filters through apps’ intents as well: hidden shortcuts to launching specific functionality within the app.

All of these searches happen as I type, as quickly as I type, with results weighted by my launch history. And if for whatever reason I want to scroll through a complete drawer of my apps (it happens), that’s one tap away. I’d say KISS manages to be both maximalist and instant.

This approach may require more taps, but less thinking. I never have to start by asking “Am I looking for a tier-1 tap app? Tier-2 swipe app? A drawer app?” Every app (and contact, search, URL or intent) is a few keystrokes away, always the same muscle memory, and that’s my idea of fast.

Not for everyone, but if “collection of perl scripts” sounds like your jam, GnuPod still works for a CLI option.

This door is already open, as GPS location is easily faked. Android, for example, has an easily-accessed developer setting for manually specifying a device location.

I was given a sous vide machine as a gift, only a power button on the device and no way to control it outside of an Android/iOS app over Bluetooth or WiFi. Not something I’d ever buy for myself thanks to the lack of manual controls (even though the experience of using the app is honestly very nice), but I’ve been preparing myself for the day it just stops working.

The color screen of e-readers is too dark for me and substantially lacks contrast. It’s very noticable. The layer for pen recognition already makes the screen darker, but the color display is adding a lot more to the darkness and lack of contrast.

There were a handful of reasons I returned mine, but this was the biggest one. Color eink isn’t ready yet, and the limited color palette wasn’t even the worst part… it was the dark screen. Needing to use the backlight so often is just disappointing, and turning it on negates all the good stuff about eink, making you feel like you’re using a really shitty tablet. Maybe things will be better in a generation or two, but if you need color you might as well get a conventional tablet.

Unsubscribing is the polite option, but this obviously isn’t what you signed up for. I wouldn’t unsubscribe, just mark as spam. If enough people do and they start having deliverability issues of important emails, maybe they’ll change their ways… but probably they won’t.

edit: They’re probably not sophisticated enough to have separate lists, so you may have unsubscribed from everything, at least if you mark as spam you can find their important emails in your junk folder.

Mark the spam as spam.

You don’t have to look at the car’s main media screen. A simplified list UI is replicated onto a small window that temporarily shows up next to the speedometer.

There are two ways to do a to-do list in Joplin: within the text of a single note or at the next level up, where an entire folder can be populated with full-fledged notes you can individually check off. The flexibility is really nice.

The Android version of FBReader has been closed-source for a number of years now.

Assuming your phone is Android and your Kindle books aren’t DRMed, KOReader.

IBM VoiceType Simply Speaking Gold

I’ve got a dorkier story: I asked for speech dictation software.

I thought of Joplin too. It lets you set an emoji for each folder and subfolder, but not for individual notes.

Also, depending on what OP means by “cloud,” they can sync Joplin clients using a plain webdav server, even one that’s just running on their LAN.

A great example of why I’d just about always prefer to get software packaged by my distro (Debian) over “straight from the developer” methods (including pip, npm, flatpak, etc.). I remember hearing about this and being like “Oh, that’s bad, but it’s not going to affect me.”

Gaim.

GIMP and Mozilla Browser were a couple of my early ones as a Windows user, but I probably saw those as worse, or at least less polished, versions of other software. Gaim (later Pidgin) was the one that first made an impression on me.

AIM was important software — it basically was social media to me at the time — and I’d stumbled into using third-party add-ons (for example, DeadAIM) for the official AIM client to add extra features and block the in-app ad banner. But it was always a cat-and-mouse game where AOL would try to block add-ons and the developers would have to work around that.

Gaim was refreshingly immune to all that stuff… it simply didn’t support ads, and all its advanced features were built-in. That it supported other messaging protocols was a nice surprise too, and to this day has soured me on siloed, proprietary messaging apps. The GTK UI also looked and felt a little exotic on Windows XP.

When I finally moved to Ubuntu, having apps like Gaim, Firefox and GIMP ready to go made things pretty comfy.

QOwnNotes

I don’t own a Kindle device so I don’t have firsthand experience, but I do know that for that platform your device will have to be jailbroken. Aside from that, these are the instructions!

KOReader, though most people will probably find the UI off-putting at first.

Thing is, it’s perfect for use on an e-ink device, which is what’s it’s primarily designed for. The desktop (Linux and Mac) and Android versions are just icing on the cake, and they all work the same and can sync reading activity between them. Tons of features, options for tweaking book layouts, plugins for integration with other services, some integration with Calibre, etc. It takes the “kitchen sink” approach and I love it. I’ve found spending the time to learn it to be really rewarding.