• From: Bleeding Kansas
  • Registered: 2009-11-09
  • Posts: 178

Topic: Lesser known Apps.

I've been on the hunt recently for applications that do "just the right amount" of things or are just plain neat. What I mean is applications that don't necessarily try to be everything to everyone. I know depending on the person and that persons needs these things vary greatly. Plus, maybe we can make a bit of a list of cool things we've ran across and save others some trouble.

Here's a few I've ran across and have or am playing with/ using:

Image Viewers/ Photo Management:
Mirage -Image viewer. Like a cross between ristretto and gpicview.
Geeqie -Thanks to a thread on here.
Shotwell -A nice little photo manager.

Graphics:
Pinta -Like GIMP Lite, but it uses mono. If you're not into that sort of thing.
xpaint -When you need power and lightness.

Multimedia/ Audio Players:
Alsa Player -Nothing new, but I don't see much love for it and honestly forgot about it until now.
GNOME-MPlayer -Don't know why it has GNOME in the name, but it's light.
Xine -Really a nice player. Maybe, not obscure, but forgotten?
Decibel Audio Player -Manages music like some bigger apps, but lacks the "extra" features, but still does a lot.

Terminal:
alsaequal -Like alsamixer only a graphic EQ and it can use other LADSPA effects.
axel -Download manager.
dict -A CLI dictionary.
iftop -Like htop for your network.
wyrd -Calendar, alram and planner.
calcurse -Another calendar and scheduler.
antiword -A Microsoft Word file reader.

Some More:
ted -A rich text editor.
nted -A musical score editor with midi.
GNU oleo -A lightweight spreadsheet. Has a gui or runs as CLI.

|My Band: 12 Honest Men| |My Screenshot Gallery on Minus|
  • luc
  • #! Die-hard
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  • From: Munich, Germany
  • Registered: 2010-03-21
  • Posts: 560

Re: Lesser known Apps.

Image Viewers/ Photo Management:
feh -A little geeky couse it is mostly cli

  • hhh
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  • Registered: 2010-08-04
  • Posts: 755

Re: Lesser known Apps.

@Zen, good call on Decibel, I love that app, but check out the upcoming audacious that has gapless playback out of the box, it's awesome. Add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list...

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bdrung/backports/ubuntu lucid main

then sudo apt-get update in terminal, ignore the warning and sudo apt-get install audacious, remove the entry from sources.list and sudo apt-get update again.

  • From: Nagoya, Japan
  • Registered: 2009-01-07
  • Posts: 1,722

Re: Lesser known Apps.

^or go to https://launchpad.net/~bdrung/+archive/backports click "View package details" and just download the deb package you need.

John
------------------------
( a boring Japan blog , and idle twitterings )
“There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C.” - Master Foo

johnraff's Website

  • hhh
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  • Registered: 2010-08-04
  • Posts: 755

Re: Lesser known Apps.

^Missed that shortcut, thanks.

  • From: Nijmegen, Holland
  • Registered: 2009-12-11
  • Posts: 230

Re: Lesser known Apps.

The cdcat is graphical (QT based) multiplatform (Linux/Windows/MacOS) catalog program which scans the directories/drives you want and memoryze the filesystem (including the tags of mp3's) and store it in a small file.
The database is stored in a gzipped XML format, so you can hack it, or use it if necessary :-)
Cdcat can store the content of some specified files up to a size limit if you want. (for example: *.nfo)
Very handy for cataloguing data dvd's and externa lhard drives.

http://cdcat.sourceforge.net/

GNu/Linux: Nu nog schoner: http://linuxnogschoner.blogspot.com/  Dutch

pablokal's Website

  • From: California, USA
  • Registered: 2008-11-29
  • Posts: 8,647

Re: Lesser known Apps.

ncdu - small terminal app to see folder and file sizes.

Note: ** Please read before posting **

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  • benj1
  • Wiki Wizard
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  • From: Yorkshire, England
  • Registered: 2009-09-05
  • Posts: 1,084

Re: Lesser known Apps.

just discovered abcde for ripping cds, tried lots of cd rippers (gui and cli) and this seems to have all the features i want, i reckon its also possible to rip dvds with it aswell, but thats a project for another day.

and theres voracious, by xyne, from over on the arch forums, its basically an rss reader daemon/server so you can read feeds in your web browser.
(its not in the repos afaik, but its a single python file, so easy to install)   

@Zen:core
your mention of oleo reminded me of this blog post http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/08/11 … ike-a-pro/, haven't tried it yet but looks good

- - - - - - - - Wiki Pages - - - - - - -
#! install guide           *autostart programs, modify the menu & keybindings
configuring Conky       *installing scripts
  • From: Bleeding Kansas
  • Registered: 2009-11-09
  • Posts: 178

Re: Lesser known Apps.

The kick over the last few days for me has been CLI apps.

I just learned that Midnight Commander has a text editor called mcedit. I think it comes with MC, because I don't remember installing it. Apparently it's a terminal version of cooledit. I'm digging it quite a bit at the moment, but I'm kind of a nano guy.

Another CLI app I've been using quite a bit is Alpine. It's a mail client and it was really easy to set-up with g-mail. Easier then mutt was for me anyway. Also, the interface reminds me of nano.

I've also been going between Moc and cplay a lot. Cplay is the one I feel like is "lesser known" as it's an older app and development seems to be dead. Cplay is really easy to learn and it's really pretty simple.

And just for fun (and to make my wife go "why" wink )
vitetris
tty-clock

Now, I've just got learn to use ecasound. Ecasound is a CLI multi-track audio studio. Maybe I can breathe new life into the old Celeron minitower yet. cool

|My Band: 12 Honest Men| |My Screenshot Gallery on Minus|
  • From: Deepest, Darkest, South Wales
  • Registered: 2010-08-16
  • Posts: 51

Re: Lesser known Apps.

I've found Goggles music manager to be a really good, lightweight alternative to Rhythmbox. Its not quite as fully featured, but it does pretty much everything and it's incredibly fast. It opens before you can blink!

For Ubuntu derivatives you can download it from GetDeb, or get the source and do it that way.

Yesterday you said tomorrow.

Gazhole's Website

  • Registered: 2009-11-03
  • Posts: 1,612

Re: Lesser known Apps.

Zen:Core wrote:

The kick over the last few days for me has been CLI apps.

I just learned that Midnight Commander has a text editor called mcedit. I think it comes with MC, because I don't remember installing it. Apparently it's a terminal version of cooledit. I'm digging it quite a bit at the moment, but I'm kind of a nano guy.

Another CLI app I've been using quite a bit is Alpine. It's a mail client and it was really easy to set-up with g-mail. Easier then mutt was for me anyway. Also, the interface reminds me of nano.

I've also been going between Moc and cplay a lot. Cplay is the one I feel like is "lesser known" as it's an older app and development seems to be dead. Cplay is really easy to learn and it's really pretty simple.

Yeah, mcedit is sort of similar to the editor Norton Commander came with (which Midnight Commander is modeled after). It's pretty decent for simple editing.

Thanks for the Alpine suggestion. Will check it out when I can. smile

Cplay is basically just a frontend for various players (like madplay, mpeg123, sox...etc), so it technically doesn't really need any development (at least until some new audio format comes around) You'd be surprised, but there are some high end digital audio players that use the cplay front-end (albeit slightly tweaked) to play flac and mp3s.

Point & Squirt
  • From: Bleeding Kansas
  • Registered: 2009-11-09
  • Posts: 178

Re: Lesser known Apps.

gutterslob wrote:

Yeah, mcedit is sort of similar to the editor Norton Commander came with (which Midnight Commander is modeled after). It's pretty decent for simple editing.

Thanks for the Alpine suggestion. Will check it out when I can. smile

Cplay is basically just a frontend for various players (like madplay, mpeg123, sox...etc), so it technically doesn't really need any development (at least until some new audio format comes around) You'd be surprised, but there are some high end digital audio players that use the cplay front-end (albeit slightly tweaked) to play flac and mp3s.

Well. being with Linux for only a few years. I honestly had no idea about mcedit. I really like it, but I just use it as a quick note taker, lyric writer and such. I guess that's the real purpose of this thread. The purpose of, "I had no idea this existed. Did you?"

Try Alpine, but be sure to check all of the options in the setup. G-Mail was easy, but then I had to figure out why it started at the oldest message. Just some small things that make you go "Ahhh that's how you do that." big_smile

Moc or CPlay? I'm kind of torn, but Moc has that MC feel and I kind of like it. smile

|My Band: 12 Honest Men| |My Screenshot Gallery on Minus|
  • pvsage
  • Internal Affairs
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  • From: Section Six
  • Registered: 2009-10-18
  • Posts: 4,911

Re: Lesser known Apps.

I realize it's a GUI amp, but Asunder (it's in the Debian repos) is a very simple CD ripper that supports ripping to mp3, WAV, ogg, flac, yada.  There's a tiny bug that crops up when you pull up the preferences menu (always jumps up a level in the directory structure) but it's no big deal.  Super simple to use, especially if you typically rip complete albums.

while ( ! ( succeed = try() ) );
  • Registered: 2009-03-23
  • Posts: 354

Re: Lesser known Apps.

I have a plan to check out twidge

From the projectpage:

Welcome to Twidge. Twidge is a tool for interacting with microblogging sites such as Twitter and identi.ca.

Twidge is a full command-line client. It is designed to be useful when you’re sitting at a shell prompt. It’s also designed to work well with the Unix/POSIX/Linux shell scripting environment. It produces output in well-formed and easily-parsed ways, and has various features for working with piped data.

It can be used to:

    * Simply update your own status and following your friends
    * Setting status based on system events
    * Receiving status updates via email, and sending your friends and your replies to email
    * Scheduling status updates for the future
    * The sky’s the limit!

This software was written by John Goerzen.

15 Reply by hhh

  • hhh
  • #! Die-hard
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  • Registered: 2010-08-04
  • Posts: 755

Re: Lesser known Apps.

pvsage wrote:

...Asunder (it's in the Debian repos) is a very simple CD...

You like it better than Ripper-X/paranoia?

  • From: Nagoya, Japan
  • Registered: 2009-01-07
  • Posts: 1,722

Re: Lesser known Apps.

Maybe everyone knows and uses this already, but xsel (xclip is similar) is very handy for doing things with the clipboard in scripts. For example you can select a bit of text with the cursor, trigger your script with a keyboard shortcut, and the script can get the text with something like 

text="$(xsel)"

In reverse 

echo "some text" | xsel

will put something in the clipboard for you to paste. xsel knows what you want automatically. smile

John
------------------------
( a boring Japan blog , and idle twitterings )
“There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C.” - Master Foo

johnraff's Website

  • Registered: 2009-12-11
  • Posts: 181

Re: Lesser known Apps.

Just had a quick play with gentoo, a file manager. Seems pretty good-very quick. Far too complicated for my needs but some power users may find it useful. It's in the Ubuntu repos.

http://www.obsession.se/gentoo/

18 Reply by lm

  • lm
  • Member
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  • Registered: 2010-08-25
  • Posts: 20

Re: Lesser known Apps.

I have a whole list of favorite lightweight applications at http://www.distasis.com/cpp/dlin.htm
I also have a list of equivalent applications for many of the Windows applications I use at http://www.distasis.com/cpp/osrclist.htm

Noticed several of the lightweight applications I like are not in the Debian repositories.  Going to attempt to rebuild from source on Crunchbang.  Have done it several times on other operating systems, so it shouldn't be too bad.  Can't help wondering if there's somewhere we could share binaries for applications not currently in the repositories so others can try them out as well.

Some lightweight applications I really like are diffh, autocutsel, flphoto, fltdj, flxine, abcmidi, abcm2ps, pcal, lcal, dialog and bash or v8cgi for menus, nano or pico, hunspell, wkhtmltopdf, urxvt, p7zip, gsar, lxsplit, bsdtar.  I also can't get along without SciTE which I've made several customizations to.  xfireworks is nice to look at too.

  • kook
  • #! CrunchBanger
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  • Registered: 2009-10-25
  • Posts: 101

Re: Lesser known Apps.

good stuff here. i dont use anymore but if you wanna freak your friends with a curses IDE that reminds of quick basic or turbo pascal, try http://konst.org.ua/motor/ smile
edit: reminds me of poor mans clock:
while true; do date; sleep 1; done;

Last edited by kook (2010-08-26 12:31:27)

  • From: Nagoya, Japan
  • Registered: 2009-01-07
  • Posts: 1,722

Re: Lesser known Apps.

^Or try this:
while true; do printf "\r%s" "$(date)"; sleep 1; done;

John
------------------------
( a boring Japan blog , and idle twitterings )
“There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C.” - Master Foo

johnraff's Website

  • Registered: 2010-05-23
  • Posts: 497

Re: Lesser known Apps.

johnraff wrote:

^Or try this:
while true; do printf "\r%s" "$(date)"; sleep 1; done;

or this

while true; do printf "\r%s" "$(date "+%A %d %B $Y %H:%M:%S:%N")"; sleep 0.01s; done;

lol

  • Val_B
  • #! CrunchBanger
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  • From: SE United States
  • Registered: 2010-01-25
  • Posts: 238

Re: Lesser known Apps.

kook wrote:

good stuff here. i dont use anymore but if you wanna freak your friends with a curses IDE that reminds of quick basic or turbo pascal, try http://konst.org.ua/motor/ smile
edit: reminds me of poor mans clock:
while true; do date; sleep 1; done;

Well, the FreePascal IDE is really terrible so I might give it a whirl, but truth be told, I doubt anything beats kwrite and a terminal window for fpc and testing. Kwrite will even make different colored bars, showing nested begin and ends. It all kind of reminds me of using tasm and edit.com, but it is so much more effective.

  • Registered: 2010-12-27
  • Posts: 13

Re: Lesser known Apps.

I always reccomend Viewnoir on these kind of threads, but #! already includes it. I also really like Bluemindo, which is a music player with multiple layouts.

  • Awebb
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  • Registered: 2009-07-23
  • Posts: 2,308

Re: Lesser known Apps.

minirok - music player, that allows you to search your library by folder structure. A feature most of those players are missing and the reason why Foobar2000 is the best of all.
crebs - GUI to create an XML for a dynamic wallpaper in Gnome.
most - pager that colorizes your manfiles.
tilda - quake console like dropdown terminal.
ffcast - screencasts with ffmpeg
anamnesis - clipboardmanager with incremental search option, daemon-client-model. It has what parcellite has not (and vice versa :-)) and it does not need to pull every package with gnome in it's name like glipper.
html2text - get a website with wget and make it a textfile, so you can grep/sed/awk the thing.
pms - DLNA compliant Upnp Media Server for the PS3 (and other compatible devices).

anonymous wrote:

ncdu - small terminal app to see folder and file sizes.

+1! Better than qt5 and baobab and how they are called.

I'm so meta, even this acronym
  • From: California, USA
  • Registered: 2008-11-29
  • Posts: 8,647

Re: Lesser known Apps.

qtfm - qtFM is a small, lightweight filemanager for Linux desktops based on pure Qt and works great with minimal desktop environments like Openbox.

Its like Thunar but without Trash and only has one dependency: qt.

Note: ** Please read before posting **

BTW if you wish to contact me, send me an e-mail instead of a PM.