Some software I use

Some software I use:

I regularly find myself reccomending software to people for various slightly niche interests, so I figured I could make a list! These broadly fall into a few categories

Terminal/TUI Programs

Programs designed for use in a terminal, here mostly but not entirely limited to stuff using a TUI to avoid dumping every program I’ve ever used here.

• cmus Cmus is a strong and simple music player, that works best with well tagged files in a directory. Its built for command line use and has support for webscrobbling, which i use with listenbrains (see below) to keep track of my listening history (and make some friends, apparently? hi nora).
• castero A terminal podcast client, in the same vein as cmus but supports downloading files from rss feeds (Note: I think cmus probably supports this feature? It’s old and was widespread and supports plugins, so I can’t imaging it’s impossible to do)
• bottom A system information monitor, called “bottom” because it’s an alternative to other resource monitors like “top” (or htop). I have a keybind setup to automatically run this in a terminal when I press ctrl+shift+esc, windows style. Supports theming, so I have it set to a yellow to match the rest of my theme.
• micro A simple nano-like text editor, with theming support and some other niceties that some people use neo-vim for. I just don’t like vim very much, for no particular reason than that I haven’t used it much. Clipboard support is nice, and theming, and I automatically create an alias for “nano” to run micro instead, because I tend to forgot. This and the themeing of all my programs is actually automatically synced thanks to some dotfile magic I can probably talk about another time.
• yt-dlp This one is a little different because it has no command line, but I use this regularly to download muisc and occasinally videos from the internet, using yt-dlp --embed-thumbnail --extract-audio --audio-quality 0 to get the best possible audio files from youtube, which I then pass through Picard to add to my library.

Alternative Front-Ends and Third-Party Clients

• vesktop One of my favorites on this list, an alternative desktop front-end for discord that allows for modification. It work’s by running the web version of discord in a box, and allowing various css edit’s and theming, as well as plugins. Now I never have to see or hear about nitro again, can shrink the window as small as I like (Important for a tiling window manager, which I use), hide the left sidebar unless hovered to avoid clutter on a smaller screen, and also make it all look so pretty. I’ve completely disabled any blurring (except for spoilers, had to re-add that exception after finding it the hard way) because it makes it easier on my eyes. Also the theming let’s me have a transparent background, which is less easy on my eyes but man it looks nice and it’s actually not that bad :3
• revanced for android devices This is kind of a big one! For all my mobile devices, I use a program called ReVanced, which is a sort of successor to the now shut down by google Vanced project, and works in a much cooler way. ReVanced is a framework for modifying and patching apps directly, meaning you download the normal apk file of the app you want (super easy to find, and legal) and then just inject some stuff into it to modify it’s functionality. Youtube is the most fleshed out of these, but there are other noteworthy apps it supports like:
• • tumblr for removing ads and the patheric “pay us please :(“ pop-ups
• • instagram for removing ads, though this one is buggier and I really want a patch removing reels entirely, but I can’t seem to figure it out myself.
• • yt music this one is particularly nice, though I still get the occasional “Do you want to pay for youtube music?” full screen ad when opening the app, but that’s not particularly bothersome for free and reliable access to music streaming whenever I need (Though I make use of a little mp3 player most of the time now, so I can’t attest to the download capability of yt music using revanced)
• • And, of course, Youtube! I use this less now, because I downgraded to a very weak device when I dropped my phone in a lake, but along with a lot of the normal things you’d expect like ad-blocking, and hiding shorts, it add’s support for SponsorBlock and, to a lesser extent, DeArrow, which are used to make youtube feel like less of a capitalist hellscape (SponsorBlock can skip midroll ads, along with interaction reminders and long intro’s and a bunch of other things, and DeArrow replaces thumbnails and titles with less click-bait heavy ones that are clear and helpful. Both are community-sourced, meaning there’s not as much relience on a single moderation team to do it all which is nice. It also means sometimes there’s just one other person who watches a small youtuber you like who regularly adds the sponsored segments, and you’ll both learn to enjoy each other’s work :) )

Other General Tools and Services

• rssguard An rss feed aggregator! I love an RSS feed, check out Aud McName’s comic about them! This is how I get most of my news about things I care about, without having to trawl through an unhealthy social media site or giant inbox of unread emails. It’s overall just a much nicer way to follow anything. I recently found out while trying to follow a particular feed with some time stamp issues (https://nora.codes/index.xml) That I was using a version that was at least two years out of date, and the version in the default apt repository on PopOS (And probably Ubuntu) is not updated. Using a flatpak solved this, though because of the version mismatch the backup and import feature didn’t work and I had to manually copy all my feeds from an SQL database. Kind of annoying but a one time problem.
• listenBrains An alternative spotify wrapped, because I don’t use spotify but I still like keeping track of my listening history across multiple services and devices. Better than last.fm, which is proprietary and relies on it’s own database that isn’t regularly updated and has very little support for adding music/artists and modifying errors in their database. This instead relies on the community sourced musicBrains database.
• musicBrains MusicBrains is a database for albums, songs, artists, recordings and the like. Anything music. It’s open source and free, run by a non-profit, and I’ve personally added over 100 albums to it. Generally if you listen to popular music, they’ll already have most of what you listen to, but I have particularly had fun adding local musicians and old, out of print filk (not a typo) albums!
• Picard Picard is a music tagger, that takes all the files you have and sorts them into neat folders with the correct title, album information, artist, etc, using the musicBrains database (as well as a few other services, if you configure it to). I use it to make sure my music is all neatly named and sorted, and has album art to play on my mp3 player while im out and about.
• GIMP A free and open source photo editor, one of my favorites. Once you get to understand it, it’s lovely, though because of it’s legacy it has slightly different standards than photoshop. I’ve heard photopea is a decent alternative but it seems to be browser based and I don’t want to need an internet connection to edit a picture.
• LINUX!!! This is kind of a hard one to reccomend just casually, but I genuinally can’t recommend getting away from windows (or mac, though I don’t have personal experience) enough. It’s so nice to not have an operating system not trying to sell me something constantly, or to sell me as a product constantly more accurately. Minimal data harvesting and increased privacy, as well as a smaller and more configurable footprint that means it runs on my now decade old laptop perfectly comfortably, mean it’s just an unbelievably better experience than windows for me, though of course there is a mandatory and steep learning curve, I’d recommend just jumping straight in. No dual booting, no secondary device with linux to tinker. Clone or replace your hard drive, put in a blank one (or wipe the old), install linux and get to it. You’ll struggle but you’ll have a much better time pretty soon. I’d reccomend Veronica Explains for learning, she has some great information, but genuinely the thing that will help you the most to learn linux is to become enthusiastic about linux. Enjoy it, listen to podcasts, find things you like about it, talk to your friends about it.
• PopOS, Specifically If you’re looking for a distro recommendation, popOS is nice enough for beginners, though I have manhandled it to look and feel a little different. If you aren’t sure exaclty what you want from an OS, I’d check out Ubuntu instead, but if you want gaming, popOS comes with some nice little configurations set up for that (I don’t do gaming, particularly,) otherwise just pick any distro and go at it. The nice thing about popOS is it’s actually based on ubuntu which is probably the version of linux I see talked about most, and means most of the help and support you can find on sites like Stack Overflow are talking about Ubuntu specifically or Debian, which Ubuntu itself is based on.
• Tiling Window Manager As far as the feel of popOS, I use the built in tiling window manager at all times (along with some gnome extensions to get me a little real estate back by collapsing the top and bottom bars into a single bototm bar) and this is very helpful for doing multiple things on a small screen. The default shortcuts are pretty intuitive and I am looking forward to trying other window managers like hyprland some time once I can be bothered to set it up.
• signal A secure, end-to-end encrypted messaging service. Based in a five-eyes country which is not ideal, but generally way more private than most messaging you’re doing. A secure email service using PGP key’s is an alternative with a similar level of security, because either way it’s still possible to determine WHO you’re talking to, even if it’s harder to see what you’re saying without access to either your/the other person’s device or your private key. Turn on disappearing messages though, verify the other person’s device in person, and extra importantly, don’t say anything you wouldn’t want found on it. If you really want privacy, no device is safe and you should talk about it in person.
• Reaper The DAW I use for recording demoes and using VST’s, simple and with a free option (with an annoying “Still Evaluating?” pop up when you open it, but still) and decent support for anything I need. This plus jack for audio routing and setup has been a wonderful experience, and given me the lowest possible latency on my old thinkpad laptop.
• Audacity For recording voice notes or acoustic songs to listen back to myself. Very helpful, free, cross platform, open source, the list goes on. Kind of plainly wonderful.
• LibreOffice An open source and free office suite, libreCalc (an alternative to excel or sheets) is the one I actually use often, and libreDraw for editing pdf’s (like my resume)
• Jekyll A static site generator I use for making personal sites and blogging, simple enough and decent documentation at https://jekyllrb.com/
• Jekyll-feed An RSS feed generator for jekyll blog posts! Nice and simple, just plop it in and it’ll work, though you can also add more feed information like an icon and title easily enough.
• Neocities For free, easy, site hosting. Has a CLI which is helpful, as I can build with jekyll and push any new or modified files to neocities in a single script. Provides minor site statistics like how many views you’ve gotten total and how many each of the last 7 days, though I don’t look at those too much. Also allows you to “follow” other websites from the neocities.org domain, so if your friends have cute personal sites there you can see whenever they update them (Or make them set up an rss feed, if you want <3)

Honorable mentions

• steam-cli Fucking hate steam and how it wants to be open all the time when you play a game, and refuses to close when you click the ‘x’ button? Me too. I’ve heard this works well instead, though I don’t play steam games enough any more to use it
• itch.io Kind of dubiously belongs on this list, because its not software per se, but I figure while I’m menitoning gaming, itch.io provides free hosting for indie games, kind of bandcamp style. I’ve found some wonderfully beautiful or silly games on here and I’d recommend just searching for key words you like until you find something you enjoy! They are almost all indie games, so expect small but also expect good
• playnite A place to collect all your games together, to not have many many different game libraries that you have to scroll at once. Support for steam, itch, epic, etc etc and also weirder things like retroArch for emulation. Also has fun stuff like allowing you to rate each game, so I definitely spent a while trying to go through every game in my library and rate it (I found a stream of someone doing something similar, maybe Mattophobia or Many A True Nerd on twitch or youtbe? and thought it sounded fun.) Got a lot of the way though and played some nice games, though!
• gPodder A podcatcher like castero, but this one specifically has support for syncing to devices like ipods/mp3 players! I used it when i worked a machining job to always have the latest episodes of bigsofttitty, kill james bond, and blowback available, along with a bunch of other ones (The strange case of the Starship Iris is cute and nice)
• piped An alternative front-end for youtube I’ve heard a lot about but haven’t used so I can’t recommend it!
• protonmail It’s fine other, but not allowing IMAP/SMTP wihtout a paid subscription? Come on, I can’t recommend it because of that.
• sublime 3 Another technically paid option, this one asks you to pay every once in a while when you save if you want to use it for free. I’ve heard emacs is good as an actually free alternative, but this is what I use right now and it’s fine!
• CCEMUX This is just too small of a thing to recommend to most people, its an emulator for lua computers from the Computer Craft (and CC:Tweaked) Minecraft mods, for testing them outside of the game. Of course I like computer craft, have you seen the other things I do?
• Lagrange A web browser designed for the Gemini and Gopher protocol, for browsing a smaller web. I like it, but there’s not a ton to do there sometimes. I’d recommend poking around a little anyways, maybe find some cute little blogs
• Neo (https://github.com/azdle/neo) A wrapper for the Neocities CLI that allows you to set a key and site for each project you have, which means it’s easier to run multiple sites. The only reason I don’t have it in the regular recommendations is I haven’t used it enough to recommend.
• Dotfiles automation and ssh-keys ? This is kind of a nebulous recomendation, but I use multiple linux devices for my projects, including a little server for backups and samba shares, and hosting docker containers, so setting up a way to sync aliases and themeing between all my devices has been very helpful, along with using ssh keys instead of passwords which means a lot less accidentally typing the wrong password 3 times and frustration. Not a specific recommendation, because theres a thousand ways to do this, but check some of them out maybe!