Linux Software you should check out

Ben — Sat, 07 Sep 2019 14:17:44 +0000

This post first appeared on my blog.

Ripgrep

Imagine grep or pt, but really really fast.

Skim

With Skim you can really easily find files in the terminal. It easily integrates with other UNIX commands. I use the following to easily open folders: alias c "cd (sk)".

Entr

This is also a utility that can be integrated with other commands. It's a file watcher that just works. I use it with nix-build to get it to file watch. alias nix-build-watch "rg -l . | entr -s 'nix-build'".

Lorri

This one is for you if use develop software with Nix. The beauty of the package manager is that it makes it easy to have encapsulated environments for each project. But using nix-shell can be an extra step that seems unnecessary. Lorri can generate files such that you can simply use direnv to solve that. You simply cd into the project folder and all dependencies and commandline tools are automatically in scope. It even works with editors such as emacs so that you can use your dev tools with the ones specific to each project.

Notmuch

Email the way I like it. Checkout my post on it.

pdfpc

I do quite a few presentations for Uni. Usually those are done in LaTeX (it simply has the best collaboration experience, at least of compsci students). At school I often used Keynote (yep, I had a Mac once). The presenter view was really awesome and I missed it with Beamer presentations. pdfpc provides exactly that.