Why software do you use in your day-to-day computing which might not be well-known?

For me, there are two three 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.

  • Manifish_Destiny@lemmy.world
    0·
    9 months ago

    I do a fair amount of pentesting and I’m on mobile, so I’ll just list software.

    Trufflehog & nosey parker (both kinda suck, but there’s nothing better)

    Subfinder

    Nuclei

    Credmaster

    To name a few.

  • kaki@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    Qalculate!, the calculator I use every time I need to do a calculation, especially if it involves units or currency conversion. Does everything I’ve ever needed out of an everyday calculator (even symbolic calculation and exact results), while keeping the usual simple calculator interface.

  • klu9@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    KDE Connect

    I’ve used it a lot just to control audio or video playing on my computer from my phone. (Sometimes when I’m sat at my computer with multiple windows and workspaces open, I even find it easier just to hit my phone’s lockscreen to pause the music.)

    I’m starting to use some of its other features, too. E.g. copying & pasting and sharing files between phone and computer.

    There’s more too I need to explore.

    (Unfortunately, sometimes I get a ‘device unreachable’ error when both devices clearly have a working connection to the same router.)

    • fossilesque@mander.xyzEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      I just introduced my partner to this a week ago. Trying to slowly convert him into a Linux user haha. It works with Windows too!

    • Showroom7561@lemmy.ca
      0·
      9 months ago

      I’ve been using that a lot, but I wish there was a “disconnect” on the phone’s app, rather than keeping a persistent connection.

    • localhost443@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      9 months ago

      It’s the best.

      Being able to communicate with apple users who are still clinging on to sms with a keyboard is great. I detest typing on touchscreens.

    • Oniononon@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      Kde connect is great. You can get notifications on pc and read texts fully in messages. I also use it to file share and send 2fa codes.

  • Auster@thebrainbin.org
    0·
    9 months ago

    KDE’s Dolphin + Konsole’s integration to Dolphin is great for seamlessly managing files with an UI and terminal hybrid.

    Though closed source (overly dramatic music plays), the text editor Sublime Text works great, and at least with major version 3 (last I checked it was in version 4), it can be converted to AppImage without major issues (at worst, paths with spaces have issues).

    Firejail is great for starting specific programs offline.

    Newsboat is the best RSS feed reader I could find for Linux, specifically due to, with its inbuilt macros, I can set it up to open in new tabs several posts from a comically large amount of feeds.

        • Libra00@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          9 months ago

          Simple but extremely useful, someone pointed that out the other day and I’ve been using it ever since. It’s my favorite feature of dolphin so far.

        • Everyday0764@lemmy.zip
          0·
          9 months ago

          and the konsole is kept automatically in the dir you are currently. is very handy when you need do do something in the terminal and you need immediate feedback.

      • kurcatovium@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        You press F4 (I believe) in Dolphin and it spawns “tab” of Konsole pointing to current location inside Dolphin window.

        • Libra00@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          9 months ago

          Whoa, I had no idea! I knew about alt+shift+F4 to open a terminal in the current folder, but that spawns a whole separate konsole instance, F4 is amazing, thank you!

  • HelloRoot@lemy.lolEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    1. xpipe – I use it to SSH into any of my servers, cluster nodes or directly into docker containers without having to remember hostnames, IPs, users. It can also bring your useful scripts to said ssh session without “installing” them on the target device, which is great because you don’t have to set it up for every new server. Also the dev is a really nice guy.

    2. Portmaster + SPN – I use it to route each app through different VPN paths with multihop support and per app firewall rules. (e.g. one app via Denmark, another via a random country, third app no VPN, fourth app gets no internet at all etc.) It really gives you full control over the traffic. afaik there is no other all in one app like this.

    3. wdfs - It’s an old project that is patched by this random github user. It’s the only way I found to mount a webDAV storage cleanly into a directory from a bash script without fucking with my fstab or being root or giving specific privileges to my user. I mount it from a bash script because that way I can use KDE wallet to store the credentials instead of having a plain text file somewhere on my fs, the script waits until the wallet is unlocked, then reads the credentials from it and mounts the webDAV to a path in my home. That is more accessible to apps and other scripts (e.g. recent files) instead of doing it via Dolphin, which generates a random string in the path every time when opening network storage.

      • HelloRoot@lemy.lolEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        Can rclone mount it transparently? I thought it is more like a one time copy / sync.

        What I mean by that is that the remote storage should look like a normal directory to the rest of the system and any reads and writes should go over the network directly to the remote without occupying local disk space.

        Also it seems to me that you have to write your credentials to the rclone config file, which I explicitly don’t want.

  • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
    0·
    9 months ago

    Every day?

    • Herbstluftwm, the window manager. I used i3 for a decade, then bspwm for a few months, then landed on hlwm which I’ve been happily using for over a year. I don’t foresee changing until I’m forced to switch to Wayland. I’ve used almost every window manager and DE available for Linux and Solaris. Hlwm has things I can no longer live without:
      • It’s entirely configuration-file-less, which means the CLI client is the first class citizen for C&C.
      • It’s tiled and keyboard controllable is, again, a first-class citizen
      • It has a sane tree model, with no weird exceptions
      • It’s stable
      • It’s fast and small. You never see it in top, sorting either by CPU or memory
    • Zsh, the shell, in which I run 90% of my applications (the regular exceptions being the Luakit browser and Factorio, the game. everything else is CLI or a TUI). Zsh is bash backwards compatible, and it has a bunch of extra convenience syntax that makes scripting more powerful, pushing out the border where switching to a real programming language is necessary. I have lived in sh, bash, and csh over my life, and I’ve tried fish and a number of others; the rich data model for process communication is compelling, but I’ve always discovered it lacking, so on zsh I remain.
    • Tmux, the terminal multiplexer, which is (almost) invariably the first child of every terminal (rio -e 'tmux attach -t#'). Because terminals crash, because it survives session restarts, because it lets me log in remotely and continue what I started in my desktop, and because it works over ssh and having a consistent multiplexer environment across machines is nice. I used sceen for years before discovering tmux, and have tried almost every other terminal multiplexer; and none add any significant value for me over tmux.
    • Helix, the editor in which I spend most of my time. Because I started with emacs and used it for years before switching to vim. Then I used vim for decades before switching to Kakoune. Then I used Kakoune for about 2 years before switching to helix. Kakoune was too much like Emacs for my taste: heavy on chording, light on modality. Helix is much more like vim: lighter on chording, more mode-driven. Chording aggravates my carpel tunnel, and I’m more comfortable in modal editors. I switched from vim because the plugins necessary to be a competent development environment got insane, and my vim was starting to take as long to start up as emacs, which was unacceptable. Also, LSP integration was super flaky and broke every six months; it’s what initially drove me to Kakoune.

    I’m currently using Rio as my terminal. It has bugs, but it’s actively developed and regularly releases will fix one more thing. It has both ligature and sixel support, and it’s wildly fast and far, far less memory intensive than either kitty or ghostty, which are both pretty fat. I am not including it in “the list” because some remaining bugs are pretty big, like randomly crashing when it gets resized or sees some sequence of asci escape codes. It’s not much of an issue because I run everything in tmux, and it crashes less with every release, but I hesitate to recommend it until it’s more stable.

      • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
        0·
        9 months ago

        That’s one I don’t remember, but I probably wouldn’t have: the config file is in Lisp. Not only is Lisp something I never use anymore, which gives it a high cognitive load, but I don’t particularly care for Lisp-like syntax.

        I’m certain there are several less common WMs that I haven’t tried. It’d probably be almost impossible to try every WM every written for X; it seems to be a common hobby project for folks interested in the X protocol.

        I did say “almost every”, but perhaps even that was exaggeration. I do think I’ve tried the majority, though.

        My differentiator for hlwm, the killer feature, shared by only two other projects that I’m aware of, is that hlwm has no configuration file. All configuration is performed through client commands. Every command interaction that can be performed by a user input - and much that can’t - can also be performed on the CLI. All (?) windowing events can also be monitored on the command line, and therefore scripted. The other two WMs that share at least some of these features are bspwm and river.

    • pemptago@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      +1 for helix. I was new to linux and TUI editors. The vim tutor was a good intro to the concept of modal editors, but needed lsp and syntax highlighting. At the time I struggled a lot with configs, so neovim was out. Helix is just a fantastic, batteries included experience. Approachable for beginners, but feature rich for novices.

      Edit: typo, grammer

  • Jeena@piefed.jeena.netEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    Right now https://jeena.github.io/recoder/ which I just released and here is why (copied from the website):

    🎬 Why Recoder?

    I used to edit family videos in Kdenlive without a problem — it handled footage from all our devices without complaining. But then I switched to DaVinci Resolve, and suddenly nothing worked right. My Sony Alpha 7C, my Galaxy S24, and my wife’s iPhone all produced files that Resolve couldn’t handle without transcoding.

    😤 Too Much Fuss, Too Many Steps

    Every time I wanted to edit, I had to hunt down the right ffmpeg settings and manually run them on each video — a frustrating and repetitive task.

    My typical workflow is simple: I create one folder per event on an external HDD and drop in videos from all our cameras. A script renames the files based on the date and time so I can easily sort them. But for Resolve, everything has to be transcoded to DNxHD — which only supports resolutions like 1920×1080 and 1280×720.

    🔄 Vertical Videos? Extra Pain

    That also meant vertical videos couldn’t work. So now, I rotate them during transcoding to preserve resolution and rotate them back in Resolve during editing.

    ✨ Enter Recoder

    I built Recoder to automate this annoying step — so I could spend more time editing memories and less time fiddling with command-line tools.

  • z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml
    0·
    9 months ago

    Espanso Text Expander. Its not Linux specific but its got so many uses. You can even use it with bash scripts to have essentially alises/text shortcuts for short or massive amounts of text. I use it for so many code snippets and template texts in Neovim and other applications that involve typing.

    • med@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      9 months ago

      I used eapanso for a few years, but kept running in to issues with it spawning hundreds of versions of itself.

      I really miss it though. Would you say it has matured?

      • z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml
        0·
        9 months ago

        I’ve used espanso for about 4, maybe 5 years and haven’t encountered this issue. I even have to compile it myself because it’s daemon mode uses systemd on Linux and I dont run a distro that uses systemd and had to modify the source code slightly. I do run it in managed mode, essentially invoking it from a startup script when my window manager starts up.

        Long story short, what you encountered might have been related to how it integrates with the init system and you might try and run it directly from a startup script. Simple test is to just try and install the latest version and see if you have the same issue.

        • med@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          9 months ago

          Thanks for the feedback - It was a systemd issue. Something caused it to continue generating slices for espanso until the machine locked up - probably spawned with each terminal. It happened on out of date fedora install 36 (when 41 was out) with gnome on it.

          Since then I’ve moved to a window manager for all my machines and would likely invoke it the same way - perhaps now it’s time to revisit!

  • Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.netEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    https://actualbudget.org/

    https://github.com/actualbudget/actual

    It’s software for budgeting. You can run it entirely local, or set it up as a server. It stores everything in an SQLite dB, let’s you import and export CSV files, and it gives you great options for querying and seeing reports on your financial records.

    I’ve got a handful of accounts, so I set up a small python utility to parse the CSVs my banks give me to something actually sensible and readable for Actual. I do that once a month, add a reconciliation entry here and there, and it’s all kept on sync very well.

    I have one morbid report titled “money pissed down the landlord drain”, and it’s far higher than I’d like to be. But it’s got close to every penny I’ve ever spent on that bullshit in one place.