Original question and text by @HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org
Why software do you use in your day-to-day computing which might not be well-known?
For me, there are
twothree things for personal information management:
for shopping receipts, notes and such, I write them down using vim on a small Gemini PDA with a keyboard. I transfer them via scp to a Raspberry Pi home server on from there to my main PC. Because it runs on Sailfish OS, it also runs calendar (via CalDav) and mail nicely - and without any FAANG server.
for things like manuals and stuff that is needed every few months (“what was just the number of our gas meter?” “what is the process to clean the dishwasher?”) , I have a Gollum Wiki which I have running on my Laptop and the home Raspi server. This is a very simple web wiki which supports several markup languages (like Markdown, MediaWiki, reStructuredText, and Creole), and stores them via git. For me, it is perfect to organize personal information around the home.
for work, I use Zim wiki. It is very nice for collecting and organizing snippets of information.
oh, and I love Inkscape(a powerful vector drawing program), Xournal (a program you can write with a tablet on and annotate PDFs), and Shotwell (a simple photo manager). The great thing about Shotwell is that it supports nicely to filter your photos by quality - and doing that again and again with a critical eye makes you a better photographer.
yt-dlp is my go-to for interacting with YouTube. Super helpful.
LibreOffice Draw can be used to modify PDFs, so I typically use it to fill out forms (whether they’re “fillable” or not).
A lesser known one: QDirStat helps visualize the size of different folders on your PC. Great when trying to figure out how you managed to fill up that new 2TB drive in a couple months.
For cli oriented folks, ncdu is a great cli alternative of QDirStat
Oh! I also use SyncThing quite a bit. It’s one of those things that “just works” in my experience, and has clients for every device.
Streamlink (with mpv) for watching Twitch streams with all the benefits of a real media player (like hardware video decoding) and without all the extra junk that occupies the Twitch web interface. It can also stream from YouTube and various other sites, record, and probably do a few more things that I haven’t discovered yet.
Unsure how well known it is, but flameshot (screenshot tool).
I prefer CLI usually, so: zoxide, the zsh git plugin for aliases (e.g.: gst is git status), fzf zsh plugin and the tldr command comes in handy sometimes.
Also, this might be useful just for me, but due to orientation of my living space, I have to fiddle with monitor brightness at least three times a day so I made myself a little Qt tray wrapper around ddcutil’s ddcquery which can change standard vesa monitors brightness/contrast (DDC/CI communication).
There is also ddcui/gddccontrol GUI that does the same thing.Flameshot’s so good and multi platform to boot!
This is not a very popular app, but I use it all the time. Full disclosure, this is my own app, but it’s free and open source.
It’s for transferring and managing files and folders over your local network. I use it whenever I need to just ad-hoc move files between things.
It also has an older brother if you need a permanent WebDAV server:
Looks cool! How does it compare to something like Warpinator?
Warpinator is meant only to send/receive files and folders, and requires a supported device on both sides.
QuickDAV lets you send/receive/manage files (meaning you can copy and move files on the host from the client). It doesn’t require a supported device in both sides, since it works with either a WebDAV client or a browser. So as long as one device can run QuickDAV, and the other has at least a browser, it’ll work. (QuickDAV works with a Sega Dreamcast!)
Warpinator is incredibly easy to use. Open the app on both machines, select the other machine, select the file/folder, send.
QuickDAV is a bit harder. Open the app on one of the machines, then type the information from the app into the client/browser on the other machine. Then you can download/upload/manage.
Syncthing, runs in background, synchronises everything between machines. Use it on my phone, tablet, NAS, desktop, Steam Deck.
I have to give a shout to starship.
I’m in the terminal all day, and with all the context switching from interruptions and meetings, having all the terminal context in my face really helps me settle back into the groove.
Sure there are dozens of other ways to do this, but a little config for a hundred different tools, all of which is customizable, makes it a pretty easy choice for me.
I’ll give a second shout for tig. Ncurses git interface with vim-like navigation makes exploring, staging, stashing, etc. super easy and way faster than the CLI. Certainly not a replacement, but a magical enhancement.
I use droposs.org to handle the family’s games.
Localsend for easy file sharing between devices
autokey — a recent “autohotkey” sort of thing for linux. It comes to mind since I recently had to find a replacement for the one I’d used previously which died of bitrot. Mostly I just use it for app-specific key remapping for Firefox so that I can disable its ^W which I only ever hit accidentally when it was possible.
Draw.io is pretty great for diagrams.
Wiki.js can embed them too.
I think Cherrytree is my most important app. It’s primarily for making hierarchical lists but you can hyperlink between nodes and to external files and URLs and you can insert files, images and tables. I pretty much use it for organising my entire life and archiving important files, links and documents. The database is a single file (which you can have encrypted), so it’s super portable and you can sync it between devices. You can easily theme it yourself too (the default theme/icons looks quite old school).
I also love GIMP 3.0
I use Fortune a lot at the terminal, even though it’s usefulness is questionable at best.
