March 4, 2026

tao_url.sh

At their base the tao shells are simply POSIX compliant(try to be) shell scripts for tiling window managed unix/linux environments. If that sentence gave you nausea or drowsiness, I don’t blame you. I offer you something deeper than the tao shells base. Let’s take a moment together at the core of the shells. Their value in my life, why they’re important, and how this may translate into yours.

For those looking for technical expository and instructions, please refer to the shell scripts and the README file. A few notes on the flow of operations below as well.

Tao Core

What is The Way? There is no one way. In as many human beings let alone living organisms, not to mention molecules, atoms and subatomic particles in addition to waves of light, sound, electromagnetic fields, we approach a number as grand as the celestial bodies governing our dreams. You have a way, and I have a way, and they are different. Wildly different. And through the lens of this writer, this is the most mysterious and beautiful element of life itself.

What is it to live? To live your way. Find your tao. Become one with it, and let it govern your breath. Let your body move accordingly. This is the kernel of creativity. Expression of life. Humanity’s orchestral contribution to the light of the universe is diminishing. Our senses, numbing. The love for our own being and thus those in company and those beyond, muted. Out of tune. We are out of tune. The world stage presents a disastrous cacophony of harsh dysfunction. We all know this. And most of us don’t know the depths of it. But we know it’s wrong. Something is wrong. That fact rots our foundation. It’s destroying us. Our song. Our billions of notes are not finding the score. We are lost. We are lost from ourselves, internally and thus externally.

We must find our way and begin breathing harmoniously within. That’s where it all starts. We are bombarded by distraction. Some, bombarded literally. We need to stop the bombardments. Everywhere. There is no more important thing that ought not be bombarded than you. I want everyone to take up this torch. Light your ember and breathe intentionally. Use this power to create, not destroy. This is tao core and it loves you. It loves all. Even its enemies. It will burn eternally a warm colorful flame well beyond our birthdays. It is the fuel that fires these very shell scripts.

The internet is a burning hell of terrible. We have never been more connected to garbage, and symmetrically disconnected from ourselves and thus the people in the circumferences. Interconnected devices has a useful and powerful place in this world. It can be used for good, but it is absolutely dominated by bad. The internet was inherently an untrusted system. We are not supposed to trust the remote computer you are accessing unless it is somebody you know, which applies to maybe 2 people i know in the real world, discounting all the nodes in between.

The internet is today’s media. And what media has done to the intelligence of culture writ large is arguably far far more damaging than beneficial. At present, we are far out of balance at the fulcrum of good and evil. You know somethings wrong. You know it’s beyond elected officials. You can feel it. In the thick of it, you can hardly feel yourself. The solution is bones simple. Find your way. Find your tao. Find your love. Try even doing something as simple as leaving yourself a note, “I love you.” You can’t share what you don’t have. Find your way, Develop your love. And every time you feel the impulse to effect a change in the world outside of you, look within first, and let the tao core do the work.

I write these shell scripts as instruments to govern my computer life. The internet is a hellfire storm, featuring some of the slipperiest slopes you will ever encounter. I stay out of the storm with these tools. I parse the information I seek. I bring it into my home and carefully handle it. Learn from it, be entertained. And that’s that. These tools keep me above the storm, and safely in the light of the sky. It’s not a perfect situation. They are some of the tools of my dojo. A digital tool set for the digital world, to mitigate its inflection on my analog life.

tui/cli folks

If you are a tui/cli user, I share these for you to use, explore, improve upon, whatever. Ethos aside, they’re really for you. You likely already have your own, of which I’d love to see.

Dmenu is an X server situation, but the shell’s don’t need to be, Wayland will do just fine (rofi in leiu of dmenu). Ought to be a flawless situation in a dwm/st/dmenu/$EDITOR environment with mpv, yt-dlp, and wget installed. A default opener/applications tao_openers.conf file is auto generated after initial use of tao_url.sh, which can be modified to your liking, along with other variables, all of which if not already, will be at some point documented in the README file. You’ll want to copy tao shells to your user’s executable dir (typically ~/.local/bin), and if it isn’t already, that dir will be most welcome in the PATH env var. Once the files are in your .local/bin, chmod the files’ permissions for execution, and its blue skies for your tao shell flight. See the README for more details.

tao shell flow

Open a url

$ tao_url.sh -> url -> select opener/browser

When typing/selecting a url to open, bookmarks and any accessible histories are at your dmenu disposal for quick access to previously visited web zones.

Search the world wide web

$ tao_url.sh -q -> search terms -> select opener/browser

Much like opening a url, searching provides a history of your searches dmenu style for faster re-searching.

View remote media asset

$ tao_url.sh -> url -> select "nsxiv" for images, "zathura" for pdfs, or any of the "a/v..." options

Search yt

$ tao_url.sh -q -> search terms -> select "yt search" -> select url -> select opener

Search yt channel

$ tao_url.sh -> ut channel url -> select "yt channel ..." -> select url -> select opener

Stream yt video

$ tao_url.sh -> url -> select "a/v/yt stream"

Download first, then play yt video

$ tao_url.sh -> url -> select "yt download > play"

Bookmark anything

$ tao_url.sh -> url to bookmark -> select "bookmark" -> add optional tags

Honestly, why?

I dropped in the README’s ethos section to better bore deeper into the understory.

Ethos: Computers and our Relationship with the Internet

What’s the point of all of this? I happen to be a shell scripting hobbyist. So crafting these ui scripts is actually enjoyable. That’s really important. I live by few rules. One of them is to die smiling, at any point. Life takes its turns and it’s not always easy to say that. I know I need to make moves if it is untrue. And so my engagement shifts. This is the wildness of wind in a creature that normally strongly associates with the stillness of trees.

Crafting a user interface layer between me and the system, including the internet not only keeps me above the mess but allows me to use a system in an aesthetic that very much resonates, as so much of one’s self reflects in the end product. That’s an element, and also important.

So there’s the personal gain for me. But what about beyond that? Is there any gain for you or I to actually use these things?

The full story of what’s happening in our devices every time we use them, actually even while they sit idly in our pockets, is a story extraordinarily outside the scope of this writing. So we will focus for a moment only on the internet. Spoiler and tldr;, the internet sucks.

Something I appreciate deeply about suckless.org is their name. The acknowledgement is inherent. Software sucks. All of it. They attempt to provide software that merely sucks less. This is especially true regarding the internet. Web browsers are terrible. All of them. The best can be found in text browsers. I love every one of them, even with all their sucktitude. So lets speak softly for a moment on the merits and ethos of using text browsers instead of gui.

The internet lure is strong. It doesn’t take much to keep a user simply connected to and aimlessly using the internet. A web page with nicely aligned and admirably spaced, sized and fonted text, featuring a simple yet pleasant color palette is all it takes. We are attracted to design. Design is art and art is emotional. I’m not talking about crying over page layout, I speaking to that thing that happens in us when something feels good. Even subtly so. When information becomes entertaining, we are roughly one click away from falling deeper into the digital world of our devices. Pure distraction awaits. The astronomical level of life distraction is merely one problem among many. The social, physical, religious and political… in a word, mass cultural effect of the internet alone is something else entirely. I say all of this not to completely overshadow any benefit that may be gleaned from this monster. Communication is critical to understanding the world of humanity at the very least. So to harness the communicative power of interconnected devices simultaneously mitigating the damage is something I attribute likely entirely too many brainwaves. But here we are. I’m going to cut off all these half thoughts to end what is really only a README file for some shell scripts.

The bottom line is to maximize our time alive, with life itself. Our actual, analog, very real bodies, minds, souls and hearts. Our own, and the others in our company. The internet is intended to be a trustless system, and we ought to use it as such, and use it far far less. Less endless scrolling, “screen time” of digital consumption. Less surveillance of our lives by strangers we do not know and ought not trust. The internet has its uses, and the tao shells exist to leverage the positives and diminish the spell. These tools and so many others alike in the wild are here to help humanity return to humanity.

Notes

Every idea introduced in this file can be grossly expanded upon, and most certainly has been done so by many others. These are mere notes to a handful of utilities for the unix/linux user. There exist other tao shells for a myriad of other tasks, and when the time comes that they find comfort within themselves, they will walk out the front door as these shells have done and join the world of open source.

*99% chance wget and mpv are in your distro’s repos (yt-dlp too)

The only reason I carry around a “smartphone” today is because of two projects aligned in great magnitude with my own technology ethos and that is sxmo on the software end, and pine64’s pinephone on the hardware side. The light so bright from these two projects standing before the telecommunications eye of sauron that they each merit there own articles. It’s on the list.

Relevant Reads

  • The Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges, 1941 > archive.org
  • Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman, 1985

Updated > 2026-03-04 19:36:09 -0800 PST