J. Adly

My Studying Stack

19 Aug 2026
productivity

The title might sound a bit weird. Why would anyone have a “stack” for studying, and what does that even mean?

“Studying stack” means the tools, utils, and rituals I use to actually sit down and study

The full stack

Hardware and environment

I ditched pen and paper a long time ago and switched to a small Wacom tablet. It just feels cleaner and more flexible, with dual monitors, one is always the terminal, the other is whatever I need alongside it, a YouTube explanation, a reference book, depends on the subject.

I hate floating window managers, so I use niri. Since I’m on Linux, I try to use it properly, which means living in the terminal. I went with Ghostty because it has shaders (nice cursor animations like Kitty) without Kitty’s weird text rendering quirks.

tmux is always running so I can jump between different tools without thinking.

I also use taskbeep, my own little Pomodoro-style (not really) timer, which lets me track my productivity stats per topic, ensuring that I am actually studying not just wasting time, and when I do waste time, it is clear as day.

Annotation and understanding

I use Xournal++ to annotate PDFs and books. When the PDFs are uni material, it helps me mark important parts and figure out how I want to refactor them later.

Handling uni material

University material eats up most of my time (because it sucks), here’s how I deal with it:

  1. Extract text and images from the PDFs with poppler-utils
  2. Recreate the material in Typst using nvim (cleaner and better than the original)
  3. Use OpenCode while rewriting (it helps a lot)
  4. Live preview with typst-preview.nvim, viewed full-screen on my phone through EinkBro

A question may arise here: ain’t that time consuming? Surprisingly not that much. My Typst template covers most of what I need, so I don’t waste time fighting the tool itself. I’m also okay with touch typing (~70 WPM consistent). More importantly, it forces you to output what you just took in. A lot of the time you think you understood something after reading it, but nah, you actually didn’t.

This way I end up with proper notes instead of messy slides, that I was forced to study to create the notes.

Spaced repetition

I use mneme (which is my own app, still in alpha, and I’m basically the only user) an Anki-like app, combined with OpenCode + MCP, you get the perfect card generation workflow.

Background noise and the internet

No study session is complete without Spotify in the background (lofi beats).

Brave for the rest wiki, docs, whatever comes up, and chat jipiti as a personal tutor when I need to check if I actually understood the shit I am studying.

Most of the config for all of this is available in my dotfiles.

Sooooo, is this a good studying stack? tbh I have no idea. It works, I study, and that’s pretty much it. At some point you have to stop optimizing the stack and just use it.