Python is, by far, the language of your choosing when you need to build a toolchain of utilities that interact with local systems, servers, other software, running processes, and generally all things outside of your application development.

I leave out application development because I still believe that when it comes to server-side application code that lives for exactly one user request, the best language is the one you are comfortable with. It may be Python, but it may also be Ruby, PHP, Scala, Erlang, Haskell, or one of those new-age sparkly languages such as Go or Rust.

Yet, as you dig deeper into forking processes, maintaining a running state, cleaning up after yourself (I’m talking about memory, I will assume that you bathe), and generally acting predictably, Python is, without a doubt, your chosen language.

Why? I’ll tell you why.

Have you heard of C * Music Player, also commonly abbreviated as its command name, cmus? If you haven’t, you’re potentially missing out on your new favorite music player (at least, since WinAmp 2.x; ahhh, those were the days).

C * Music Player is for UNIX-like OSes, which essentially means Linux and OS X. You can usually grab it through your package manager of choice (apt in Debian-based Linuxes, Homebrew in OS X).

It looks a little like this:

That’s cmus running in a tmux session in iTerm 2, using the Zenburn color theme that now ships along with it (finally).

You might be thinking, “Ugh, a terminal-based music player? How limiting.” Not so. What if I told you that you could have global keyboard shortcuts and Growl notifications? Well, you can (at least in OS X). I’ll tell you how.

Apple, in their ultimate wisdom, have made it impossible to install the AirPort Utility version 5.6 in Mountain Lion. The utility works, mind you, but you can’t install it.

That is, unless you have a little bit of bash-fu on your utility belt, which I do. You can extract the utility from the installer package and run it directly to configure your older-generation AirPort Express. Want to learn how?

Perhaps you’ve heard of Amazon’s new Cloud Player and Google Play (previously Google Music), and perhaps you’ve used one or both of them. If you’ve already formed your own opinion, it’s unlikely that what I will say here will change it, but if you’re considering trying one of these (admittedly awesome) services, you may enjoy reading on.

Though I love my Macs, I often use Ubuntu. I have an old laptop running Ubuntu (which I’m typing this on right now) and I occasionally run Ubuntu in VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion just as an efficient alternative to Windows or when I’m doing something that is particularly Linux-friendly.

My favorite window manager right now is Xmonad, a tiling window manager written in Haskell. I know very little of Haskell, which makes navigating its configuration files, which are Haskell scripts, somewhat daunting, but the window manager itself is simple and incredibly fast.

There are two tools that everyone who uses Xmonad comes to love: xmobar and dmenu. The former places a persistent status bar at the top of the screen, which of course you can customize, and the latter is triggered by a keyboard shortcut and opens a one-line menu of programs in your path that is filtered as you type. The ultimate no-frills launcher.

This is the story of how I finally got Xft (anti-aliased TrueType fonts) working in dmenu. It makes it look amazing. Seriously.