I don’t know if it has been already mentioned but I love bat a lot. It’s like the cat command but with colors and line numbers. Makes things a little bit easier.

GNU Stow, definitely. I can’t stress enough how wonderful this app has been for my sanity. I use it to manage my dotfiles and personal data.

I made one dotfiles folder, which contains home, etc and usr subfolders. I put all my configs in it (dotfiles, themes, custom keyboard layouts, etc) in the relevant subfolders, then with Stow I symlink dotfiles/home to /home/username, dotfiles/etc to /etc and dotfiles/usr to /usr, and poof symlinks are created for everything in it. That way all my configs are in one folder, I can sync it to my NAS easily, make it a git repo for version control, and even upload it to github. It’s amazing 🥰 I also made a personal folder which contains Documents, Pictures, Videos, etc, all symlinked to /home/username/Documents and such, so I only have one folder to back up for my personal data. Yes I’m very lazy and hate doing backups 😅

Rofi (or here for the X11 version) : It’s the best app launcher by miles, even if I used a DE I’d still use rofi. But I also use it for a lot of other stuff that it’s much less well known for: the run mode for launching scripts and other executables, the ssh mode for ssh, rofi-calc for a very light and fast calculator that understand natural language, rofi-games as a games launcher, rofi-emoji as emoji selector… Rofi is life, rofi is love, rofi is God.

Libation to liberate audiobooks from Audible. There’s tons of apps to download and un-DRM your files from various platforms, but most only work on Windows. This one does work on linux 🥳

Lots of self-hosted apps for my media server, but they are all pretty well known (Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, Komga) except maybe Suwayomi Server for manga (it can sync progress to AniList, and there are plugins to enable downloading from online manga reading sites)

ani-cli for watching anime because I’m a crazy person who grew up with MS-DOS and TUI apps make me happy. Also it’s often more convenient than having to check ten different websites to find the one anime you want to watch only to discover that half of them have been taken down.

yt-dlp to download videos from YouTube. I use wrapper scripts to make it more convenient to use because I’m lazy, but it’s great.

https://actualbudget.org/

https://github.com/actualbudget/actual

It’s software for budgeting. You can run it entirely local, or set it up as a server. It stores everything in an SQLite dB, let’s you import and export CSV files, and it gives you great options for querying and seeing reports on your financial records.

I’ve got a handful of accounts, so I set up a small python utility to parse the CSVs my banks give me to something actually sensible and readable for Actual. I do that once a month, add a reconciliation entry here and there, and it’s all kept on sync very well.

I have one morbid report titled “money pissed down the landlord drain”, and it’s far higher than I’d like to be. But it’s got close to every penny I’ve ever spent on that bullshit in one place.

Aside from ones listed here:

System Tools

• WinApps - Run Windows applications seamlessly integrated into your Linux desktop environment, like native including Adobe products.
• Waydroid - Run Android applications in a container on Linux with full hardware access.
• Topgrade - Upgrade all your system packages and dependencies in one command.
• AM (AppImage Manager) - Easy AppImage management for installing, updating, and organizing portable applications.
• Starship - Fast, customizable cross-platform shell prompt with Git integration and status indicators.
• InShellisense - IDE-style IntelliSense autocomplete and suggestions for your terminal.
• Tabby - Modern terminal emulator with tabs, split panes, and extensive customization options.
• Zeit - Qt GUI frontend for scheduling tasks using at and crontab utilities.
• KWin Minimize2Tray - KDE extension that allows minimizing windows to the system tray instead of taskbar.
• Flameshot - Feature-rich screenshot tool with built-in annotation and editing capabilities.
• CopyQ - Advanced clipboard manager with searchable history and custom scripting support.
• Safing Portmaster - Free open-source application firewall with per-app network control, DNS-over-TLS, and system-wide ad/tracker blocking.

Productivity Tools

• DSNote - Offline speech-to-text, text-to-speech and translation app for note-taking.
• NAPS2 - User-friendly document scanning application with OCR and PDF creation capabilities.
• Morphosis - Simple document converter supporting PDF, Markdown, HTML, DOCX and more formats.
• Obsidian - Powerful knowledge management app with bidirectional linking and graph visualization.
• BeeRef - Minimalist reference image viewer designed for artists and designers.

Media & Entertainment

• Popcorn Time - Stream movies and TV shows via torrent with built-in media player.
• Nicotine+ - Modern Soulseek P2P client for sharing and discovering music files.
• XnView - Versatile image viewer, organizer, and converter supporting hundreds of formats.

Happy to list out the self hosted stuff too if there is interest.

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.

1. xpipe – I use it to SSH into any of my servers, cluster nodes or directly into docker containers without having to remember hostnames, IPs, users. It can also bring your useful scripts to said ssh session without “installing” them on the target device, which is great because you don’t have to set it up for every new server. Also the dev is a really nice guy.

2. Portmaster + SPN – I use it to route each app through different VPN paths with multihop support and per app firewall rules. (e.g. one app via Denmark, another via a random country, third app no VPN, fourth app gets no internet at all etc.) It really gives you full control over the traffic. afaik there is no other all in one app like this.

3. wdfs - It’s an old project that is patched by this random github user. It’s the only way I found to mount a webDAV storage cleanly into a directory from a bash script without fucking with my fstab or being root or giving specific privileges to my user. I mount it from a bash script because that way I can use KDE wallet to store the credentials instead of having a plain text file somewhere on my fs, the script waits until the wallet is unlocked, then reads the credentials from it and mounts the webDAV to a path in my home. That is more accessible to apps and other scripts (e.g. recent files) instead of doing it via Dolphin, which generates a random string in the path every time when opening network storage.

GNU parallel, to run commands on all cores, and for its filename pattern substitution.

For example: ls *.flac | parallel ffmpeg -i {} {.}.mp3 encodes a directory of FLAC files to MP3. parallel -a <(ls *.flac) -a <(ls *.mp3) --xapply copytags {1} {2} then copies each FLAC file’s metadata to the corresponding MP3 file (which ffmpeg already does, just to illustrate the --xapply option).

edit: copytags is https://github.com/DarwinAwardWinner/copytags if that’s useful for anyone.

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.

Not Linux exclusive, but https://freefilesync.org/ and https://goaccess.io/ my beloved

Easy file sync and easy log checking

Localsend is rad, super useful: https://localsend.org/

Send any file across different devices over the network. FOSS and fast. Highly recommend.

I really like units. It feels much better to use than the calculator that pops up after a Google search.

~ $ units '190 cm' 'ft;in'
	6 ft + 2.8031496 in

KDE Connect

• https://kdeconnect.kde.org/

I’ve used it a lot just to control audio or video playing on my computer from my phone. (Sometimes when I’m sat at my computer with multiple windows and workspaces open, I even find it easier just to hit my phone’s lockscreen to pause the music.)

I’m starting to use some of its other features, too. E.g. copying & pasting and sharing files between phone and computer.

There’s more too I need to explore.

• https://community.kde.org/KDEConnect

(Unfortunately, sometimes I get a ‘device unreachable’ error when both devices clearly have a working connection to the same router.)

FreeTube, a desktop client to watch YouTube videos, without an account. Why not use a browser without an account? Well, it has a watch history, favorites and subscriptions as if you had an account - but its all “offline” account, without Google involved (besides watching their video). So it manages an account with subscriptions, without YouTube account. Plus it integrates an ad blocker and SponsorBlock, and has a few more features on its sleeve.

kdotool, a xdotool like program for KDE on Wayland. Just learned about it when setting up another application. But I will use it for independently too.

There are more, but this is what came to my mind right now.

Qalculate!, the calculator I use every time I need to do a calculation, especially if it involves units or currency conversion. Does everything I’ve ever needed out of an everyday calculator (even symbolic calculation and exact results), while keeping the usual simple calculator interface.

FlameShot. In my opinion, the best and most versatile screen capture app for Linux distros, especially if you use Gnome as your DE.