Aaron Kelly's Blog

Tools I use daily

The following are everyday computing tools i use (or really want to believe I do) to maximise productivity, and get the most amount of enjoyment I can out of the system I’m using.

If you want the most accurate picture of what I’m using today - the easiest way to do that is to look at what packages I have installed in my Nix home-manager configuration: https://git.sr.ht/~aaronkelly/configfiles/tree/master/item/nixos/nixpkgs/home.nix

However, I created this post to talk about these tools in general, and hopefully it will be updated as I discover new tools to supplant existing ones, or revert back to a trusted tool after getting far too carried away on the hype train.

A lot of these tools have been found via a combination of:

• reading articles on https://news.ycombinator.com/
• searching on https://alternativeto.net/
• looking at https://github.com/ibraheemdev/modern-unix

Note: anything marked with ~ is in danger of being removed, as it’s not being used daily

audio

~ cmus ~ moc

• https://sr.ht/~tenacity/tenacity/ : Our project initially started as a fork of Audacity as a result of multiple controversies and public relation crises

audio + video

• kodi: excellent media server, connect it to a remote seedbox and you have a movie library on the cloud
• gnome-sound-recorder: when you need to record some audio quickly - it’s great!
• [[mplayer]] fantastic general audio and video player
• opusTools: the ultimate lossy encoding format - Opus replaces both Vorbis and Speex
• mpv (drew uses it
• vlc
  • cvlc: command-line version of vlc. the curses view is great: cvlc -I curses [FILE/URI]

I also have a love affair for these programs:

• mpg123 - Fast console MPEG Audio Player and decoder library
• ogg123 (nix: vorbis-tools): Extra tools for Ogg-Vorbis audio codec
  • NOTE: OPUS has replaced ogg vorbis and speex

~ cmus ~ moc

DAWs

• ableton (windows only)
• bitwig-studio (linux)
  • on linux, there’s also https://www.tracktion.com/
  • and https://ardour.org/

browsers

• firefox / firefox dev browser:
  • addons: dark reader, ublock origin, ~tree-style tabs
• brave (a fork of the Chrome browser)
  • addons: same as firefox, but replace tree-style tabs with Tabs Outliner

Extensions/addons# Audio and video

• [[mplayer]]
• vlc (run in ncurses mode for a great command-line experience) (see [[cvlc]]) p [[fraidyc.at]]

[[uBlock Origin]]

Command-line tools

These tools in this list probably belong in their own sections:

• asciinema
• aws: the AWS cli
• baobab
• ffmpeg: audio/video conversion tool
• fzf
• jq: json processor
• lftp
• rclone: great utility, but I mostly use AWS S3 for everything these days
• xz - lossless compression program based on LZMA/LZMA2 compression algorithms ~ ack ~ ag

Disk usage analysers

• Linux
  • dust - du + rust = dust. Like du but more intuitive
  • ncdu - Disk usage analyzer with an ncurses interface
  • baobab
• windows
  • spacesniffer (Windows).

more Linux alternatives can be found here: https://www.how2shout.com/tools/best-disk-usage-analyzer-tools-for-linux-system.html

File managers

• ranger (linux)
• total commander (windows)

File transfer

• CURL
• https://github.com/schollz/croc - Easily and securely send things from one computer to another. Fantastic tool that just works

IDEs

[[VSCode]]

Note taking

Obsidian - basically just markdown with wiki links

Operating systems

MX Linux, [[searching-for-my-container-os|FedoraCoreOS]], Alpine Linux and Windows 10.

System hardware information

• pciutils (in order to get for lspci)
• lsusb
• hwinfo
• powertop: battery power consumption and management tool

web browsers

• firefox
• links

Windows (TODO: organise by category instead of OS)

• ventoy (replaces rufus!) (balenaEtcher is also good but does not support burning MX Linux bootloaders) - USB/SD image burner
• bleachbit - disk space cleaner
• chocolatey - package manager for windows
• diskpart - command-line disk partitioning utility
• ext2fsd - mount linux partitions on windows
• git-bash - linux-like command-line for windows
• greenshot - screenshot program
• itunes - regrettably it’s the only reliable ipod management program on windows (Clementine doesn’t support devices atm)
• nirsoft suite (nirlauncher.exuue as a GUI )
• screentogif
• spacesniffer (successor to windDirStat)
• sysinternals suite
• workspacer (also tried fancy zones and plumb, but not good for me)
• xmlstarlet ~ hwinfo

See also

[[Tools i am trialling or want to try]]