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DATE: Sat 20 Mar 2021 By: HexDSL@Posteo.net
Both The Internet's Chris Were and Friend Drew (uoou) of Trendy Talk have little sections of their websites and gemini pods dedicated to software that they like. I don't want a permanent section of the site on this but I did think it would be fun to write a little something about software that I like, endorse, support or whatever.
The thing is though, I don't see the point in duplicating effort. With that in mind, I will list no software that is on either Drew or The Internet's Chris Weres lists.
The Chris list (Gemini themed)
If you are reading this via the World Wide Web, you may notice that those links are not clickable (Unless a browser plugin is "fixing" them) the reason for this is because I have started writing my posts as "gemini-first" and as such am marking things up in a way that Gemini understands, The web be damned. Gemini is free, easy to use, faster and generally better suited to the kinds of writings I err, write. So I'm supporting HTML as "legacy"
I wont stop posting here but I'm not doing extra work to format text for a browser. If someone objects and wants to write me a script or snippet that will fix is then ill use it but I'm not putting effort into something I literally want to burn!
I know, EDGY!
Enough of this nonense. Heres my list.
Aseprite
Aseprite is my Pixel art tool of choice. It has everything I want from a pixel art package, as far as I can tell the only down side is that its fucking hideous. The animation tools work basically the exact way I would make them if I were designing something myself. I love the work flow. Its great. older versions are available from git but at some point license was changed, so if you want the newest version you gotta pony up the pounds.
Rofi
Its like dmenu but less suckless. Its for launching applications. Literally one of a million launcher but this one is the nicest in my opinion. Also it has 100% compatibility with Dmenu so that's nice. Oh, and built in themes can save you time. Didn't save me time I wanted mine to be black and pink.
Calcurse
Literally a magically good calendar/scheduling application - Magical. IT has everything i want, days, weeks, months even years make an appearance and it all runs in a terminal, I sync mine to posteo. Oh, should also remember to mention it syncs to-do-lists too... not that that bit is particularly well documented by posteo.
NCurses Music Player Client (Plus Plus)
While it does have a fucking stupid name, its also a really nicely built MPD client that has everything I want from a music player. Its fast, terminal based and ugly. Everything I want out of an application. It hasn't ever crashed on me and its manages my massive music collection effortlessly.
Calibre
Calibre is an e-book manager/suite. It has more options that a human would ever need as well as an interface that makes it look like 1992. The thing is, if you have a lot of e-books, you need to manage them some how and Calibe while being far from perfect will manage a shitload of book with no problems at all as well as taking care of meta-data and e-reader syncing. Its the best application for this, and the only one that is actually usable.
Alacritty
Its a Terminal application. I know. Not a cool pick there bit its also got some REAL nice font rendering and good emoji support. Its gpu accelerated too, oddly...
Toot
I don't like social media, not at all. I do however sometimes have to check into Mastodon to make sure I don't miss DMs and mentions. It would be rude of me to ignore people just because I don't like the platform. Toot is a terminal based Mastodon client that makes it all a little less painful.
speedtest-cli
Speed test CLI is a command line application that lets you test your internet speed... yep. That's it. But, this is such a useful little application that I had to mention it. I run it, its tells me my down and up speeds. No fuss, no GUI. It's great.
Lace
Drew wrote this script to merge peoples gemini-micro-what-ever posts into a more consolidated viewing experience. I love it. He did a great job. It's simple, command line based and makes for a way more interesting feed than twitter ever did. Centralised server free micro-blogging is cool as fuck.
Newsboat
Was RSS? Install newsboat. Its the best News (RSS) reader you can get. Terminal based, fast, easy to use and so simple. Its great. I'm currently syncing mine to Newsblur website.
BSPWM
My tiling window manager of choice. Works well with games, doesn't do anything stupid and has a crazy small memory footprint. I love BSPWM and I really have tried ALL the other.
There are loads of things that I could add to this list. But this, coupled with the links I gave at the top of the page should be enough to keep any little fledgling Linux user busy for ages.
Enjoy, I guess.