Disclaimer: I tried searching for something like “useful programs”, “useful packages”, “useful tools”, “recommended packages”, etc. Don’t see any posts like that, if this is a duplicate, then it’s not intentional and my search skills have failed me.

Anyway, I was watching a YT video today and the guy launched a cool program in his terminal, I paused to see what he was running. It was btop, of course being new I never heard about it. Then I thought – how many cool tools/packages are there, which people use, but I am not aware of?

So what do you like? What do you install on a fresh install? What are the most useful tools in your belt? What can’t you live without on Linux?

Perhaps I’ll find something useful :)

  • NostraDavid@programming.dev
    61·
    4 days ago

    Some applications I’ve not seen yet:

    Terminal

    https://ntorga.com/gzip-bzip2-xz-zstd-7z-brotli-or-lz4/

    • lz4 - fastest compression/decompression (several GB/s); compression is good, but not amazing; very little CPU usage
    • zstd - very fast compression, fast decompression (few GB/s compression; ~600MB/s for decompression; better or equal compression compared to zip, depending on level)
    • cloc <folder> - gets lines of code for a project/folder
    • gdu <optional location> - like ncdu, but faster (written in go) - think TreeSize/WinDirStat for the terminal
    • stat <file> - built-in application to show the modified, created, etc stats for a file.
    • hyperfine - benchmark for binaries - run this in front of a command to have it run multiple times, and show some statistics.
    • jpegli - great to recompress JPEG files into smaller filesizes, with only very few/minor visual effects.
    • just - used with a Justfile in a project so I can run just to see the commands, or run just test, just clean, just ... to run project-specific commands.
    • msedit - ye olde edit.com, reborn! Feels a little bit cursed to use an MS text editor on the terminal, but it’s better for beginners than nano or micro or whatever.
    • oxipng - lossless png compression
    • pngquant - lossy png compression (it forces the file to use a palette of n colors, which reduces the colors used, so it will affect your files, unlike oxipng.
    • upx - compress binary files
    • visidata - analyses csv files, and shows some stats. Like Data Wrangler for the terminal
    • oxfmt - think “oxidized prettier” (file formatter for programmers)

    GUIs

    • Whatpulse - I’ve been tracking my keypresses since 2005. not a terminal application, unlike the rest.
    • fsearch - Linux alternative to Everything by Voidtools. It will be a little bit different, but it does the job. mlocate package, with the sudo updatedb and locate commands, if you prefer the terminal
    • keepassxc - password manager
    • speedcrunch - best GUI calculator, IMO. Just a bar for input, and a bunch of stored results above it. Use the ans variable to use the previous answer in the current calculation, like ans*2 to multiply the previous answer. Or use variables, like x=5, y=2, x+y: 7.
    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      upx - compress binary files

      Just to be clear, the parent poster means “binary as in executable binaries”, rather than “binary as in non-text”.

      mlocate

      This was replaced by plocate some time back in Debian, which IIRC was generally faster. Some distros used a compatibility package for some time; you may actually have plocate installed yourself.