Linux has lots of terminal emulators. What distinguishes Alacritty from the vast majority of terminal emulators? It differentiates itself by offering GPU-acceleration combined with a minimal feature set.
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Category: Reviews
Essential System Tools: pet – command-line snippet manager
This is the third in our series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities. pet is a simple command-line snippet manager. The software is written in the Go programming language.
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Essential System Tools: gtop – System monitoring dashboard for the terminal
This is the second in our series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities. gtop is an open source system monitoring utility written in JavaScript.
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Essential System Tools: ps_mem – accurately report memory usage of programs
This is the first in a series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series will examine both graphical and text based open source utilities. The first tool under the spotlight is ps_mem, a small utility that reliably reports how much memory is consumed by an application.
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Polo File Manager: Up and Down Like a Rollercoaster
Linux is well endowed with graphical file managers with tons of original creations together with fork upon fork of GNOME Files. Polo File Manager is not a fork of GNOME Files nor any other established file manager. This original creation is written in the Vala programming language.
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Qmmp – Qt-based Multimedia Player – the sound with no limits
Qmmp is a cross-platform, open source, Qt-based multimedia player. The default user interface is similar to Winamp or xmms. But there’s also an alternative user interface.
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calcurse – free calendar and scheduling application for the command line
calcurse is an open source, text-based calendar and scheduling application. The software keeps track of events, appointments and everyday tasks. The software is lightweight, fast and reliable. It’s designed for the console or terminal, locally or on a remote machine.
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peek – animated GIF screen recorder
Peek is designed to make short screencasts. It’s not a general purpose screencast application like OBS Studio.
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GNOME Podcasts – podcast client for the GNOME desktop
Podcasts are shows, similar to radio or TV shows, that are produced by professionals or amateurs and made available on the internet to stream and/or download. They are a popular source of entertainment. There’s lots of great podcasts that are Linux-centric, which I surveyed in this review.
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musikcube – free terminal-based audio player and streaming server
musikcube is a marvellous console application. It’s lean, looks beautiful, offers a good range of features, and is very stable. I’m not liking its slow syncing metadata which is annoying if you’ve a large music collection. The mouse support is particularly welcome.
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StingRay – simple chess graphical user interface
StingRay is a new entry in the field of Linux-based chess software. It’s billed as a simple chess graphical user interface with basic functionality to run against UCI and XBoard engines.
The software is designed to be lightweight and not burden the chess player with features they’ll never use.
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gPodder – podcast client written in Python
gPodder is an open source tool that downloads and manages free audio and video content (“podcasts”) for you. The software is written in Python and sports a simple GTK interface. The software package also includes a command-line interface which is called gpo. It lets you listen to podcasts on your computer or on mobile devices.
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bat – super charged cat – my favorite colorizer
bat is a drop-in replacement for the cat command adding advanced syntax highlighting and Git integration to show file modifications. It’s a really useful utility that is a massive leap up from cat. bat’s written in the Rust programming language.
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flameshot – simple to use screenshot program
Being able to take a screenshot comes in handy so many times. Linux is blessed with a good range of competent screenshot software. One which has recently caught our attention is Flameshot, an easy to use, open source, Qt-based screenshot utility which is adept at capturing custom areas of a desktop.
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castero – command-line podcast player
If you’re tired of bloated GUI software and are looking for a capable podcast player, give castero a whirl. With a few more features, this podcast would tick all the boxes.
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Vocal – a modern Vala podcast player
This podcast tool has some really interesting features, but stability issues mean it’s impossible to recommend in its current state. But we’ll keep an eye on its development. If they can iron out the major bugs, this podcast player will be an interesting alternative.
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Review: The Binary Times Podcast
I recently authored a detailed review of the Linux podcast scene, grilling 25 podcasts targeted at Linux and open source enthusiasts. Like any roundup of this type, it’s almost inevitable that a few podcasts missed my radar. One of these is The Binary Times Podcast. Apologies to the hosts of the show.
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googler: Google Web and Google News from the command-line
I love working with the command line. Seriously, I think there’s hardly anything more productive and versatile for a software developer than the terminal. Maybe it’s the hacker in me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a heavy user of graphical applications, but the terminal will always have a special place.
I’ve recently come across a command-line tool that’s right up my street. It’s called googler, an open source tool to Google from the command-line. It’s written in Python, so that ticks another box for me. googler isn’t affiliated to Google in any way.
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Review: The Linux Podcast Scene – all the movers and shakers
It’s been a long time since we covered Linux podcasts. Sadly, some great shows have podfaded, but there’s new ones entering the scene. We’ve therefore compiled a fairly comprehensive roundup of active Linux-related podcasts. We don’t feature in this article podcasts that have stopped releasing new shows.
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youtube-dl: Download Video and Audio Files From Streaming Sites
youtube-dl is a cross-platform, open source, command-line program to download videos. Its name belies the fact it supports tons of streaming sites besides YouTube. I’d never heard of half of them.
The software is written in the Python programming language and needs the Python interpreter (2.6, 2.7, or 3.2+).
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