Originally Posted by Bornabe
List up some apps for Linux you guys enjoy that I can maybe take a gander at.
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Some minor notes: I don't run any Desktop Environment, and I'm not a Qt vs GTK evangelist. I honestly don't care what background library they use as long as they do what I want. I'm also a console whore, so a lot of these applications are text only.
Music: Quod Libet -- It's the music player that has come the closest to satisfying me. It has the best tag support I've ever experienced in a player and by far the most powerful search engine. I've tried quite a few other media players over the years (XMMS, Amarok, Audacious, Rhythmbox, Sonata and metric of other MPD clients, Exaile, BMPx... I could go on and on), but they've all had lacks in one area or another.
It's not all a walk on flowers with QL however. The thing I find missing the most is the server/client approach that MPD uses, playlist display in a decently scriptable form, ability to customize what the search by default should go through of tags[1], filters based on tags on the song[2], sane key binding interface, and possibly a lot more I've forgotten.
In the future I might be switching to lomp, but there's still quite a lot of work that needs to be done before that happens.
IRC: WeeChat -- It supports several languages (C, python, perl, lua and ruby), which makes scripting quite easy (even though the scripting language interface is just a proxy to the C one). It has very sane defaults and is generally pretty stable. The theme system is also quite nice.
I actually recently switched to WeeChat (from Irssi). The main reason for the switch was the theme system, but not having to write plug-ins in perl is also quite a nice feature. The only thing I miss from Irssi is the completely insane stability it had.
Browser: Firefox -- The only browser that supports tabs in a tree style manner on the left side of the display. Midori[3] might be a potential winner in the future, but it currently isn't stable enough, nor does it support my insane tab mode.
Terminal: rxvt-unicode -- urxvt is probably the most used application on my computer. It has decent support for insanity options (such as eye candy, xft fonts, etc) and probably one of the few terminals to handle multi-byte characters without flipping over after a week. It also has a perl interface which is nice for additional laziness features (such as opening the last seen URL in firefox).
Another quite nice feature is that it can be run in a server/client mode, where the clients share backend. Yay for saving resources!
I've also yet to experience a crash with urxvt, so it will probably remain my terminal of choice for years to come.
Media player: mplayer -- Their release cycle is a void, but it's by far the most powerful media player for both Windows (I went there!) and Linux. The SVN version can be considered quite stable for most of it, and if you hit a bad version you can always revert to the version you had before.
It plays almost everything (nothing plays anything anyway) and it's decently fast at it as well. It also supports nVidia's vdpau API, so it's _amazingly_ fast if you have a card with vdpau support.
Shell: zsh -- By far the most amazing tab completion I've ever experienced. It allows close to insane amounts of changes, but let's copy/paste some instead of writing:
Code:
Midkemia ~/usr
16 usr % ~ 2009-10-05 16:33:32 haste pts/11
Midkemia /home/haste
17 ~ % addons 2009-10-05 16:33:39 haste pts/11
Midkemia ~/addons
18 addons % oGlow 2009-10-05 16:33:42 haste pts/11
Midkemia ~/addons/oGlow on master(1.11-128-g81ceff4) tracking origin/master
19 oGlow:master!? % git status 2009-10-05 16:33:46 haste pts/11
# On branch master
# Changed but not updated:
# (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
# (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
#
# modified: oGlow.toc
# modified: oglow.lua
# modified: pipes/bags.lua
# modified: pipes/bank.lua
# modified: pipes/char.lua
# modified: pipes/gbank.lua
# modified: pipes/inspect.lua
# modified: pipes/mail.lua
# modified: pipes/merchant.lua
# modified: pipes/trade.lua
# modified: pipes/tradeskill.lua
#
# Untracked files:
# (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
#
# ui.lua
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")
Midkemia ~/addons/oGlow on master(1.11-128-g81ceff4) tracking origin/master exited 1
20 oGlow:master!? % git add oglow.lua 2009-10-05 16:33:49 haste pts/11
---- modified files
oglow.lua oGlow.toc pipes
---- other files
ui.lua
Fully possible with Bash as well, but it's much more hassle to execute. Especially if you want to have caching and such.
Editor: vim -- no comment should be required really.
Torrents: rtorrent -- One of the few console clients. I don't really need to see my torrent client that much and it's scriptable over the XMLRPC interface. On top of that I can access it from my web-browser if I really get the urge to do anything odd and I add torrents by using watch folders. I also automate quite a lot, so I might go into rtorrent once a month to adjust the speeds.
Application launching: dmenu -- I don't have window decorations or any panels (at all). I just use dmenu to launch stuff. To quote wikipedia
Originally Posted by Wikipedia
dmenu is similar in function to utilities such as Katapult or GNOME Do for linux or LaunchBar or Quicksilver for Mac OS X in that it allows quick launching of programs from a graphical environment using the keyboard.
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All that a side.. Seems I don't really use that many applications. I want to mention one last thing however. I generally don't care much about what other people use, nor should you. Use what you like and don't bother us with it. It might seem like a odd thing to say after writing such a post as above, but it's not like I'm forcing any of it on anyone, nor will I lead a crusade for any of the applications mentioned. It's all my insanity baby!
[1] I've however patched this into QL myself.
[2] By default QL only shows filters for artist, album and title. I've added: original artist, original album, original title, version, date, genre, style, albumartist, perfomer:x to the list as well.
[3]
http://www.twotoasts.de/index.php?/p...i_summary.html