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Linux @lemmy.ml
HaraldvonBlauzahn @feddit.org

What is your most useful Linux app which others might not know about (please don't just give the name but a link and why it is good for you) ?

Why software do you use in your day-to-day computing which might not be well-known?

For me, there are two three things for personal information management:

  • for shopping receipts, notes and such, I write them down using vim on a small Gemini PDA with a keyboard. I transfer them via scp to a Raspberry Pi home server on from there to my main PC. Because it runs on Sailfish OS, it also runs calendar (via CalDav) and mail nicely - and without any FAANG server.
  • for things like manuals and stuff that is needed every few months ("what was just the number of our gas meter?" "what is the process to clean the dishwasher?") , I have a Gollum Wiki which I have running on my Laptop and the home Raspi server. This is a very simple web wiki which supports several markup languages (like Markdown, MediaWiki, reStructuredText, and Creole), and stores them via git. For me, it is perfect to organize personal information around the home.
  • for work, I use Zim wiki. It is very nice for collecting and organizing snippets of information.
  • oh, and I love Inkscape(a powerful vector drawing program), Xournal (a program you can write with a tablet on and annotate PDFs), and Shotwell (a simple photo manager). The great thing about Shotwell is that it supports nicely to filter your photos by quality - and doing that again and again with a critical eye makes you a better photographer.
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  • Every day?

    • Herbstluftwm, the window manager. I used i3 for a decade, then bspwm for a few months, then landed on hlwm which I've been happily using for over a year. I don't foresee changing until I'm forced to switch to Wayland. I've used almost every window manager and DE available for Linux and Solaris. Hlwm has things I can no longer live without:
      • It's entirely configuration-file-less, which means the CLI client is the first class citizen for C&C.
      • It's tiled and keyboard controllable is, again, a first-class citizen
      • It has a sane tree model, with no weird exceptions
      • It's stable
      • It's fast and small. You never see it in top, sorting either by CPU or memory
    • Zsh, the shell, in which I run 90% of my applications (the regular exceptions being the Luakit browser and Factorio, the game. everything else is CLI or a TUI). Zsh is bash backwards compatible, and it has a bunch of extra convenience syntax that makes scripting more powerful, pushing out the border where switching to a real programming language is necessary. I have lived in sh, bash, and csh over my life, and I've tried fish and a number of others; the rich data model for process communication is compelling, but I've always discovered it lacking, so on zsh I remain.
    • Tmux, the terminal multiplexer, which is (almost) invariably the first child of every terminal (rio -e 'tmux attach -t#'). Because terminals crash, because it survives session restarts, because it lets me log in remotely and continue what I started in my desktop, and because it works over ssh and having a consistent multiplexer environment across machines is nice. I used sceen for years before discovering tmux, and have tried almost every other terminal multiplexer; and none add any significant value for me over tmux.
    • Helix, the editor in which I spend most of my time. Because I started with emacs and used it for years before switching to vim. Then I used vim for decades before switching to Kakoune. Then I used Kakoune for about 2 years before switching to helix. Kakoune was too much like Emacs for my taste: heavy on chording, light on modality. Helix is much more like vim: lighter on chording, more mode-driven. Chording aggravates my carpel tunnel, and I'm more comfortable in modal editors. I switched from vim because the plugins necessary to be a competent development environment got insane, and my vim was starting to take as long to start up as emacs, which was unacceptable. Also, LSP integration was super flaky and broke every six months; it's what initially drove me to Kakoune.

    I'm currently using Rio as my terminal. It has bugs, but it's actively developed and regularly releases will fix one more thing. It has both ligature and sixel support, and it's wildly fast and far, far less memory intensive than either kitty or ghostty, which are both pretty fat. I am not including it in "the list" because some remaining bugs are pretty big, like randomly crashing when it gets resized or sees some sequence of asci escape codes. It's not much of an issue because I run everything in tmux, and it crashes less with every release, but I hesitate to recommend it until it's more stable.

  • I like game emulation and to manage my ROM library, I use Geode-GEM. It is simple but cusomizable app to manage your ROM based on console and emulator you have.

  • AutoKey automation / word expander tool.

    • I reconfigure ALT + i/j/k/l to ↑←↓→ globally, and more similar shortcuts.
    • It expands abbreviations of one's choice like "gCo" to git commit -m '
    • One can assign scripts to abbreviations and hotkeys. E.g., when I press CTRL + Shift + [ it surrounds the selected text with a tag:
     
        
text_selected = clipboard.get_selection()
text_input = dialog.input_dialog(title="Wrap with a tag.", message="E.g., type cite to get <cite>x</cite>.", default="")
keyboard.send_key("<delete>")
clipboard.fill_clipboard(f"<{text_input[1]}>{text_selected}</{text_input[1]}>")
keyboard.send_keys("<ctrl>+v")

    I'm likely not even harnessing AutoKey's full capabilities and it's already absolutely indispensable for being a huge time-saver and annoyance reducer.

    - -
    ✍︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.

  • Right now https://jeena.github.io/recoder/ which I just released and here is why (copied from the website):

    🎬 Why Recoder?

    I used to edit family videos in Kdenlive without a problem — it handled footage from all our devices without complaining. But then I switched to DaVinci Resolve, and suddenly nothing worked right. My Sony Alpha 7C, my Galaxy S24, and my wife's iPhone all produced files that Resolve couldn’t handle without transcoding.

    😤 Too Much Fuss, Too Many Steps

    Every time I wanted to edit, I had to hunt down the right ffmpeg settings and manually run them on each video — a frustrating and repetitive task.

    My typical workflow is simple: I create one folder per event on an external HDD and drop in videos from all our cameras. A script renames the files based on the date and time so I can easily sort them. But for Resolve, everything has to be transcoded to DNxHD — which only supports resolutions like 1920×1080 and 1280×720.

    🔄 Vertical Videos? Extra Pain

    That also meant vertical videos couldn’t work. So now, I rotate them during transcoding to preserve resolution and rotate them back in Resolve during editing.

    ✨ Enter Recoder

    I built Recoder to automate this annoying step — so I could spend more time editing memories and less time fiddling with command-line tools.

  • UpNote. I use it like a combination of the gollum wiki described by OP, but I just put everything in there. I have watch and reading lists for things I want to check out, writing projects, notes for TTRPG games, I keep extensive notes on healthcare-related stuff, and so on. I like UpNote because it's lightweight, has windows, linux, and android apps, and because it has a one-time $25 lifetime membership that does free syncing forever instead of a monthly subscription like most other things seem to. I've tried OneNote, Evernote, Obsidian, Joplin, AnyType, and a bunch of others and didn't like them for various reasons, but UpNote is both pretty small and also has a pretty full-featured editor that can do rich text, all kinds of formatting, media files, etc.

    The only thing I've run into that UpNote wasn't ideal for is I started writing a novel a couple months ago and managing the structure and notes and all that got a little unwieldy so I picked up Scrivener. Still wish they had an updated linux client or there was some good, complete, feature-rich linux-native equivalent, but it runs pretty good under wine, so.

    • Well, my main reason to use Zim Wiki and Gollum is that all the information stays on my computers -no sync service is needed, I sync via git + ssh to a Raspberry Pi that runs in my home. And this is a critical requirement for me since as a result of many experiences, my trust in commercial companies that collect data to respect data privacy has reached zero.

      The differences between Zim and Gollum are gradual: Zim is tailored as a Desktop Wiki, so each page is already in editing mode which is slightly quicker, while Gollum is more like a classical server-based wiki, which is normally accessed over the browser (but by default, without user authentication). The difference is a bit blurry since both just modify a git repo, and Gollum can be run in localhost, so it is good for capturing changes on a laptop while on the road, and syncing them later. A further difference is that Zim is a but better for the "quick but not (yet) organized" style of work, while Gollum is better for a designed and maintained structure.

      Both can capture media files and support different kinds of markup, while always storing in plain text. Gollum can also handle well things like PDFs which are displayed in the browser, and supports syntax highlighthing in many programming langages, which makes it nice for programming projects - it is perfect for writing outlines and documentation of software, and I often work by writing documentation first.

  • The Docker Engine makes hosting applications over your network easy, if you have spare hardware I highly recommend setting up your own server.

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