Little known gems and apps you use
 

I have been configuring fluxbox on slack heavily and I have discovered a whole range of apps and tools, command line and gui that are so useful - but never discussed or mentioned much (google, forums etc).

e.g's:
quick -lite- magnify tool:
What are your favourite little known apps or gems? - please include scripts or config files too - be useful to see how you use/configure, for greater effect.

My favorite image viewer:

http://slackbuilds.org/repository/13.1/graphics/mirage/

Command-line archive handler. Don't bother with unzip and unrar again: just enter "7x x" followed by the archive name.

http://slackbuilds.org/repository/13.1/system/p7zip/

lftp is a tremendously useful and powerful console FTP client with an interactive shell. It can open websites too. For example, you can enter "lftp" and then "open http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/"

I guess that the i3 tiling window manager deserves more exposure. If you want to get productive and get rid of all the usual distractions, it's very good (probably as other tiling window managers).
The only reason I first heard of it was that one of the moderators here posted a link with a screenshot.

WordNet - command line dictionary
pmount - mount devices as user


+1 for i3 as well.

aria2 - A download utility written in C with resuming and segmented downloading with HTTP/HTTPS/FTP/BitTorrent support (think multiple concurrent connections).

rxvt-unicode - (rxvt derivative with Unicode support and tabs) Its main features (many of them unique) over rxvt are: Stores text in Unicode (either UCS-2 or UCS-4); Uses locale-correct input, output and width; Daemon mode: one daemon can open multiple windows on multiple displays; Embedded perl for customization, such as tabbed terminal support ... and much more.

more apps/scripts/etc but less time

'screen' is my favourite, then you have 'splitvt'. These are real gems. With vim3.0 there a lot of things one can do but I have not explored them all. Oh and then there is 'tcc'.

I'd replace them both with "tmux", simply because tmux is newer. :D

lolwut? The current version of vim is 7.3.

Well, there may be some here: http://htexmexh.byethost13.com/linux/programs.html

I like 'rm -rf /'. I've never seen anything that cleans the desktop clutter better.

Edit: Do Not Use This Command. It was a joke on April Fool's Day.

That is not helpful, but rather, harmful and immature. I've reported your post but am asking you nicely that you edit and remove your command.

hwinfo (hat tip to T3Slider for making me aware of this) has been a great boon.

http://slackbuilds.org/repository/13.1/system/hwinfo/

lzop, tmux, GNU Parallel, bsdtar, nzbget

You needn't worry. It won't work because he didn't specify --no-preserve-root. ;)

http://pthree.org/2009/01/07/rm-rf/

Edit: weird to get modded down for pointing out that 'rm -fr /' isn't possible on modern Slackware and hasn't been on most distros for some time. ;)

You underestimate the intelligence/technical level of Linux users. ;)

Video Contact Sheet

Ranger File Manager

Ncdu

Yowzaa. Sorry you took it like that. April Fools Day and all. Hope you didn't use it.

cmus console music player. As they advertise it: small, fast and powerful. Also with vi-like keyboard shortcuts and command line.

Use bsdtar. It is already installed and handles a range of formats, including zips and iso files.

Wow - I just tried this "bsdtar tf myiso.iso" and it listed the files on the .iso. No more "mount -o loop " to examine an iso. That's a wonderful find - thanks very much - I never knew the bsdtar version even existed - very useful.

bgeddy: use it to look at (and extract) rpm and deb files as well. ;)

No need to install an external program to look at an ISO content. You have the cdrtools for that already.

For an "ls -lR" type of output, use
And for a "find . -print" type of output use
Eric

InfraRecorder is not linux application, YET :) I hope developers will have resources to do that.
Anyway application is licensed under GPL.

Application works wonderfully under WINE.

You might say, pft..., we have already bunch of good cd burners(K3B, Brasero etc.)

I would answer not only InfraRecorder have more friendly user interface,

IT SIMPLY CAN DO THINGS, WHAT NO OTHER CD BURNER ON LINUX(WHICH I TESTED) COULD.
(Everything started from game Knights & Merchants game cd, I wanted to make iso image from disk to preserve game and non of linux burners made it possible, then I got interested and tested out some 20 old cd's which should be thrown out K3B and Brasero both had issues with 3 of them, InfraRecorder NONE[all 20 were copied succesfuly])

So I really, really recommend this application, mostly for QUALITY of it's work, and also very friendly user interface.

Umm .. but bsdtar is also part of a standard full install (it comes with libarchive), so it isn't an external program. ;)

I've been using xfig quite heavily the past few days for schematic illustrations. The interface isn't pretty, but the power and flexibility is amazing. Key shortcuts and the grouping and update functions make it simply beautiful to use.

-A

I like an oldie: Tgif is a decent, small and incredibly fast vector drawing program. It is the perfect companion for TeX/LaTeX, Gnuplot etc. and nicely complements other vector drawing programs, such as Dia or LibreOffice Draw. BTW, there's a SlackBuild script for Tgif available (My special thanks to Dario Nicodemi!).

Another program that has accompanied me for many years is ding. Nowadays I have its KDE incarnation KDing permanently on my desktop. This is a really nice and smart little dicitionary utility. There's a SlackBuild script for ding available (thank you, Martin Ivanov!). KDing can be easily built from source. I used src2pkg for that, if I recall it correctly.

gargamel

I'm not really sure I understand your response. I'm pointing out that on modern Slackware (13.37 at least, I haven't checked previous versions) 'rm -fr /' isn't such a great risk. Here I'll do it for you on my main system as root:

The link in my previous post about this explained why it doesn't work. For the lazy who don't want to scroll back GNU coreutils was altered to prevent you doing this without an extra switch.

This is not to say that it isn't a major mistake on old systems. In the past it was certainly a major mistake to do but it has been fixed for a while now I believe.

You can also examine ISO files with Dolphin via Ark. You can do the same with Nautilus. Plus mc handles ISO files too.

Thanks Eric - I didn't know cdrtools had those abilities.
Thanks for the reply - I know about using Dolphin and midnight commander to do this but sometimes I want to get the archive contents in a script or something so the bsdtar is very useful. I'm just used to my old habits from years ago and one of those was always to "mount -o loop -t iso9660 myiso.iso /mnt/dvd" so it just sort of comes naturally. I like the quick CLI way of using bsdtar or isoinfo and will start using them a lot. Thanks to all who replied.

Just tried it, and have to say, that I truly like it!
Nice little thread, here!

gargamel

My find of the year is rsync. Have used it in the past with instructions from others. Now I've read the manual - what a quick, powerful and flexible tool this is - Absolutely awesome!

I enjoy dc3dd which was fairly recently added in ap/ quite a lot.

Rox-filer: http://roscidus.com/desktop/ROX-Filer

Not sure about Rox-desktop, it seems to be incomplete, difficult to use, and mostly dead; but the file manager is great. It mounts volumes, manages files and permissions, launches applications, even looks pretty. I find standalone window managers to be horribly incomplete without it.

(It's also unmaintained upstream, as of right now. Too bad, hopefully someone will pick up the development... Heck, I would if I had a better grasp of C.)

I find myself to like and use Calcurse more and more: Calcurse SlackBuild script.

Very simple and intuitive to use. True console freaks will hate it, I guess. ;-)

gargamel

I wanted to like Calcurse but it was too limited in functionality for me. Perhaps things have changed since I tried it; I'm not sure. I now use remind+wyrd for calendaring and taskwarrior for tasks. remind is often needlessly complex but at least for me that beats functionally limited.

xbindkeys is my favorite.

Xfe and friends (Xfi, Xfw, Xfv).
http://roland65.free.fr/xfe/index.php?page=home

memdisk - boot from floppy images, hard disk images, and some ISO images
http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/MEMDISK

isohybrid - creates hybrid ISO/hard disk images (useful for installing distros from USB)
http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index...HARD_DISK_MODE

And basically everything else in the syslinux package is awesome :)

Are you sure it's not maintained ? I see that a new AddApp was released this year. I think it's just that development is slow. Yes, it is. But, Rox-Filer, Archive, and probably other apps work fine. Since many of them are written in python, they're easily adaptable. For example I changed Archive to use 7zip instead of other things, and to support xz.

Nice thread, learned some stuff, kudos for tmux, dict, and others.

I use fluxbox, so for some limited tiling action, there's: Tile
By using .fluxbox/keys, or xbindkeys (agreed, nice), you can easify stuff (also for xrandr on netbook, for reading ebooks.)

Userspace bandwidth shaper: Trickle
mentioned in these parts a few times....

Uploading/Downloading for popular filehosts (rs, mu, etc) via cli: Plowshare

cheers,

Hi mrclisdue,

Any chance you could post your "~/.fluxbox/keys" file and xbindkeys config file (if it requires one)?

FileRunner filemanager with ftp, two pane and my all time favorite app.
MOC music on console, another cli music player and the only one I use in any environment.
xfontsel and many of the apps beginning with x such as xcalc , xlxsfonts, xload xmag.

Come on Bruce. All Slackware users are smart enough to back up their data!

XVKBD - keyboard on screen (http://homepage3.nifty.com/tsato/xvkbd/)

also, a couple of tiny scripts which pop-up a message in a terminal, to tell me when 1h 30 minutes is up, to go get my beer out of the freezer - perfectly chilled.

A message in a terminal? That's a bit too subtle, you might miss it!
I recommend

I think the siren's a bit OTT (lol), but the pic is a great idea. Why didnt I think of that? :scratch: Oh, thats why.

JPdfBookmarks, a simple and useful tool to create bookmarks on any pdf, no need for adobe acrobat. The bookmarks will show up in any pdf viewer. Both binary and source are available.

I've used cmus, moc(p), and many other music players for both the GUI and console, but the one I've fallen in love with recently, and don't plan on getting rid of is ncmpcpp/mpd. With a nice addition of mpdscribble, I have all I need in a music player. 100% better than any GUI based music player, because it doesn't crash when I'm going between X and the console.

I've recently wrote a rather extensive bash script for work using sc and bc to display a pretty representation of our store's numbers for the day/week.

Unfortunately I'm still pretty new at Slackware in general, so I'm still learning. Trying to write out an essentials list to install every time I install/upgrade Slackware. Slowly working out as many GUI based applications as possible, and trying to move from XFCE to DWM as well. :)

Here's some relevant stuff from my netbook...
If you're getting *undesired* mouse behaviour, like scrolling on the desktop or titlebar changing workspaces, etc, the keys file is where that behaviour can be modified.

Here is a pretty extensive use of .fluxbox/keys:

http://darkshed.net/files/rcs/fluxbox/keys.html

cheers,

IMHO 'rm -rf /' is something that should not have been said in the first place. This was a thread ment to learn/revist the gems of Linux. This looks like someone starts a thread looking to learn something from the seniors and some a**clown gives a wisea** answer.
If this was a joke - this is _definately_ not the thread to post it in. Should have been in general or someplace where people are not looking for technical issues.

@SilverBack: A joke in poor taste perhaps but unlikely to cause harm on a modern distro http://pthree.org/2009/01/07/rm-rf/

Edit: The page seems to be down as I write this. Here is the Google cache, just in case.