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.

this is more a selfhosted thing but i adore it: https://github.com/silverbulletmd/silverbullet

you can write your own Javascript functions (will be lua in the near future) and use them directly in the editor.

https://ledger-cli.org/

Plain text double-entry bookkeeping for home finance and budgeting. Pretty sweet, once you get used to it.

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.

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

OTPClient

Awesome TOTP app that can import your Aegis Authenticator database, which then you can keep in sync with your phone and desktop.

Super handy.

gnome-network-displays let’s you cast your screen to a wireless display (Miracast) or to a Chromecast device.

It works with KDE no problem and even under Wayland.

It creates a virtual display that can be organized like any other display: unify with another screen or extend the desktop using your DE’s default method/UI. And then it uses standard screen sharing conventions to send content to that virtual display.

I don’t know what kind of dark arts the developer(s) employed to make this possible, but the end result is simple wireless display in Linux that just works! A MUST for using Linux in a business setting.

Redshift, it changes the brightness/color on the display bluer closer to midday and redder at night. Twilight is a similar app on android.

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

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

You’ve heard of it for sure, but shout out to Audacity. I used Cool Edit Pro for years before having to switch to Adobe Audition. The UI in Audacity feels surprisingly familiar and it does what I need it to do.

Steam added an excellent screen capture feature to their overlay, but I like being able to capture my screen anytime, not just when playing games with the steam overlay.

gpu-screen-recorder is the perfect tool for this, you set up a command to run at startup and the software records the last X minutes in the background, with barely any hardware utilization. Add a hotkey for another command that saves the recorded clip to a file, and boom, simple and efficient replay recorder. I’m honestly surprised this app wasn’t mentioned yet.

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.

ffmpeg - www.deb-multimedia.org . I edit podcast videos for distribution to subscribers. High-quality video produces very large files but if they’re only going to be watched on laptops, tablets, and phones, I can throw away a lot of bits without noticeably affecting quality on a phone screen.

And nothing does that better or faster than ffmpeg.

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.

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✍︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.

I’m trying Linux for the first time as soon as a serving hard drive arrives, bookmarking this thread!