Essential software list

Back to Main Page

The personal list of essential and minimal software as well as some extra

stuff.

Essentials

Shell

The only shell you'll ever need.

Window Manager

dwm

A fast and extensible dynamic window manager written in C.

Terminal emulator

st

Lightweight terminal emulator

Text Editor

vim

emacs

While vim is the must-have and covers about 90% of text editing work, Emacs

provides that extra 110%.

File Manager

vifm

The best file manager for the vim user.

Browser

ungoogled-chromium

links

One is for general use, the other for a quick search of textual information.

Program launcher

dmenu

While primarily used for launching programs, dmenu can be repurposed for pretty

much anything in conjunction with shell scripts.

Image viewer

sxiv

feh

Two of them.

Video player

mpv

omxplayer (Raspberry Pi)

MPV is a neat small package and can play youtube videos just by link.

Omxplayer is made for Raspberry Pi and works much smoother than MPV or VLC out

of the box.

Music player

cmus

While it has some unintuitive commands, it is otherwise everything you'd need

from a music player.

PDF reader

zathura

A minimal PDF reader with vim-centric keybindings.

RSS reader

newsboat

THE RSS reader.

Email client

neomutt

Highly configurable email client with extensive documentation, available

everywhere.

Backup tools

rsync

A good pair for sftp.

Firewall

Dead simple firewall.

Notification daemon

dunst

Minimal notification daemon that doesn't gets in your way.

Keyboard layout

xkblayout-state

A small program for switching between keyboard layouts.

Extras

Dwm extentions

dwmblocks

A pretty much essential extra program to run multiple scripts for the dwm bar

on multiple independent timers.

Bash extentions

hstr

Another essential extra program to simplify the use of bash's autocompleting

through history.

Fonts

noto-fonts

siji-fonts

liberation-mono

Siji is a glyph font that provides a set of icons for your dwm bar.

Compositor

compton

picom

Although compton is not actively maintained, it's blur effects are much lighter

on computer resources than picom.

Pulseaudio

pulsemixer

pamixer

Pulsemixer is more visual than pamixer but a bit slower when executed from the

command line.

Terminal colorscheme

pywal

Generates a terminal color scheme based on an image or wallpaper.

Other

dupeguru

A neat tool to search for duplicate files, music, and images.

youtube-dl

Download any video or audio from Youtube.

scrot

The simplest screenshot tool there is.

unclutter

Automatically hides mouse cursor from the screen when you don't need it.

https://github.com/sharkdp/bat

Provides syntax highlighting for cat'ed files.

cava

Terminal music visualizer

---

Back to Main Page