Today I wanted to share the programs I use. This seems to change every few years and I thought it'd be fun to track it and look back at the tools I used at a later time. For this list, I'm obviously not going to include every little package and utility I have installed like 'ls' or 'man' - that would be insane. I also won't list the programs I use for work (ie Teams, Chromium, etc), or the tools I have installed for the network technologies program I'm in (ie PacketTracer, Wireshark, etc).
I use the GNOME Desktop Environment and also won't include all the GNOME utilities like Document Scanner or GNOME Screenshot. Currently, I'm using the Arch-based distribution EndeavourOS as my operating system.
As you can see, I rely mostly on terminal-based applications for my non-work related computing tasks. The benefit of terminal applications is that they're typically faster, more powerful, more configurable than GUI applications, and generally more fun to use.
LibreWolf - I could probably (and may eventually) write an entire post about LibreWolf. It's a fork of Firefox without all the useless features, with an emphasis on privacy and security. The two essential extensions I use is uBlock Origin and Vimium.
Kitty - my terminal emulator of choice. There's probably a better one out there, and maybe one day I'll try something else, but I love how tabs are integrated. I usually have several tabs open and switch between then with Alt+h and Alt+l.
cmus - my music library manager, probably the best music application I've ever used.
mpv - a media player with a minimal GUI. It plays just about everything I throw at it.
ranger - a text-based file manager with vim key-bindings.
newsboat - a fast RSS reader. In addition to handling a standard RSS/Atom feeds, I've configured it to either download or open YouTube videos in mpv.
vim - my text editor of choice. In fact, this website's content, HTML, and CSS is managed/written in vim.
OnlyOffice - An office suite with high compatibility with MS Office filetypes. Outside of work and school, I really only use the Spreadsheet functionality, but I've been considering switching to Gnumeric.
sc-im - an ncurses based, vim-like spreadsheet calculator. This is a great terminal based spreadsheet program, but it's really unintuitive for me to use and takes me a bit to do simple calculations.
calcurse - A text-based calendar and to-do application. I stopped using calcurse because I couldn't get it to sync properly with my email provider's CalDAV.
pass - a terminal based password manager. It worked fantastically until I had issues with gpg. I may return to using this some day.
Thanks for reading. Feel free to send comments, questions, or recommendations to [email protected].
