Power Apps

The following programs mostly target power-users and programmers.

Recurring characteristics:

• free software
• lightweight
• fast
• featureful (I want the program to empower me, not to restrict me)
• versionable configuration (plain text, non-XML)
• keyboard-driven
• text-oriented interface

Or more simply put, an Emacs package…

I try to avoid curses-based programs.

Other application listings:

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/List_of_applications
• https://www.gnu.org/manual/blurbs.html: The GNU software collection contains some not-so-famous gems. I think it deserves more fame.

My personal listing:

• 3D graphics: Blender
• Archivers: atool, bzip2, cabextract, cdrtools, cpio, gzip, lha, lrzip, lz4, lzop, p7zip, unace, unarj, unrar, unshield, unzip, upx, xz
  • atool is a wrapper around many tools to unify compression and extraction from command-line.
  • cdrtools can process ISO files.
  • xz offers a good compression ratio together with great decompression performance. Compression is quite demanding. bzip2 has little to offer compared to xz. p7zip has the features of tar, xz and ccrypt in one program.
  • lrzip is at its best on large files and with multiple CPUs available.
  • upx can compress executables.
  • The rest is for decompression.
• Assembly: NASM, Yasm
• Audio editors: Audacity
• Binary file tools: chrpath, DHEX, Emacs (nhexl-mode), ltrace, nm, od, strace
• Bindings: xbindkeys, xcape, xdotool
• Calculation: bc, calc, Emacs (calc, Lisp), Maxima, PARI/GP, Octave
  • bc and calc are simple arbitrary-precision calculators. bc is lighter but calc has somewhat more features. Both can be used in limited environments or in shell scripts. Emacs’ M-x calc is more complete and more convenient for interactive use. Emacs also has M-x ielm.
  • PARI/GP is an extremely fast and advanced algebra system for number theory. Great for prime numbers and such.
  • Octave will serve as a Unix-designed Matlab.
• Camera capture: Guvcview, q4vl2

• Clipboard tools: xsel

  Using Emacs everywhere, xsel is barely useful. I only use it to yank the filename of pictures from sxiv.

• Contacts: Emacs (org-contacts)

  I used to use Abook, a stand-alone curses contact manager. Contacts are stored in plain text and as such they are versionable, but the automatic numbering makes up for huge diffs. The curses interface is not very powerful (limited search capabilities, limited edition).

  Org-contacts is much more powerful than Abook: free form, arbitrary fields, contacts can be fuzzy-searched or retrieved from anywhere within Emacs.

  Versioning your contacts is a great way to centralize them, instead of spreading them across your mail agent contacts, CSV files, etc. Plain text contacts also means it is easy to write a converter from a CSV file (e.g. using Emacs Lisp or AWK).

• Cryptocurrencies: electrum
• Cryptography: ccrypt, encfs, GnuPG, pass, Pwgen
  • GnuPG is essential at many levels, from communication to data encryption. Asymmetric encryption ensures that sensitive data stored on an untrusted platform (i.e. online) cannot be compromised remotely by reversing a bad password.
  • ccrypt is good at encrypting single files symmetrically, e.g. for users without a PGP key.
  • encfs can encrypt folders and mount them as an encrypted file system. Files can be browsed transparently without being ever written in clear to the disk. It uses a fuse backend which makes it portable across systems at the expense of speed.
  • pass is one of the few password managers that can be used to safely store and synchronize passwords online. It uses asymmetric encryption (through GnuPG). Git is used to synchronize the password store. I recommend using Emacs’ helm-pass to fuzzy-search the passwords on input.
• Dictionaries: aspell
• Diff tools: Emacs (ediff, ztree), diffoscope
• Disk utilities: Emacs (disk-usage), gparted, parted, rmlint, shred, trash-cli, tree, wipe
  • Emacs’ disk-usage is a good alternative to ncdu: it’s a very fast and convenient disk usage analyzer.
  • trash-cli is a command-line interface implementing FreeDesktop.org’s Trash specification. It can be combined with a file browser for easier use. Emacs also has the delete-by-moving-to-trash variable.
  • wipe can delete folders securely while shred can only process files.

• Document processing: Emacs (Org-mode), lilypond, pdf2svg, Texinfo, TeX Live

  Consider using Org-mode over other markup formats like Markdown. See http://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only.

  Prefer Texinfo over Man pages which are very limited. Most man readers don’t support cross-references, fuzzy search or section browsing. Both Emacs’ M-x man and M-x woman support those features however. Texinfo manuals automatically generate an index which is extremelly useful for browsing.

  TeX-based processors offer the best typographic rendering while based on what is possibly the worst programming language. Org-mode has good export support for TeX / LaTeX.

• Document readers and tools: antiword, apvlv, catdvi, catdoc, docx2txt, Emacs (pdf-tools), evince, ghostscript, odt2txt, mcomix, poppler, pstotext, unrtf, wv, xchm, zathura

  • apvlv, pdf-tools and zathura are light and keyboard-driven. zathura supports PostScript .ps files and SyncTeX. apvlv supports UMD, HTML and .txt files. pdf-tools supports SyncTeX and has good text search and selection facilities, it enables many Emacs features (Helm, Ivy).
  • Evince is far too heavy but can fill PDF forms. (Yet another ill-conceived PDF feature…)
  • Poppler has numerous PDF converters (e.g. pdftotext).
  • ghostscript can convert PDF to and from PS.

  Most of these programs can be used for previewing document formats in text form.

• E-mail clients: Emacs (mu4e, notmuch)

  I used to use Mutt: it’s extremely hard to configure for a very limited result. It does not support viewing e-mails and composing at the same time; you can’t really copy text from the pager; multiple-account support is rather tedious to configure.

  mu4e is moderately easy to configure, extremely extensible with Emacs Lisp and does not suffer from the limitations of Mutt. You can fuzzy-search contacts, e-mails, preview HTML, display embedded pictures and much more.

  notmuch has supports tagging and tree display of threads: https://notmuchmail.org/screenshots/#index4h3

• File browsers: Emacs (dired, Helm Find-Files), ranger
  • I used to use ranger, but being curses-based, it can only be that useful. The column display is nice though. It can preview all sorts of file but graphics display is obviously limited. Emacs-based browsers are much better at this. It can run an arbitrary command on any file selection and it remembers the selection in every folder. It can run various powerful commands conveniently, such as recursive hardlink creation or batch-renaming.
  • Emacs’ Helm Find-Files makes for a revolutionary file browser: typing anything will fuzzy-filter the current directory, or even subdirectories. The filtered results can be browsed with special keys: you can select files from different directories and apply arbitrary actions to them. It has a binding to switch to Eshell from the currently-browsed folder. It’s possible to batch-rename selected files from multiple folders using Wdired.
• File synchronization: hsync, rsync
  • Read the documentation carefully. rsync has a lot of useful options, like --append-verify, --progress and --size-only.
  • hsync is useful to detect renamings and can be called before rsync to speed up the process.

• Finders: Emacs (Helm, Ivy)

  I used to really like fzf and search programs like agrep (from the tre package) or ag (The Silver Searcher). If you live in Emacs, those are completely superseded by Helm or Ivy.

  Emacs interactive completion can effectively be used everywhere: for structured documents, code completion, file search, command history, folder history and more.

• FTP clients: curlftpfs, Emacs (TRAMP), NcFTP

  Emacs’ TRAMP allows you to work on remote files (move, delete, download) and edit them transparently: first they are automatically downloaded, then all edits are done locally within Emacs, and last the file is uploaded upon saving.

• FTP servers: vsftpd

• Gaming emulators: DGen, DOSBox, Gens/GS, Lutris, Mupen64Plus, PCSX-Reloaded, MAME, Wine

  Lutris attempts to provide a one-click install & play interface. It’s especially useful for games that are tricky to configure right.

• Gaming tools: DriConf, TiMidity++, xosd
  • osd_cat from xosd can display text on screen, such as FPS or network traffic.
  • TiMidity++ is useful for old games using midi music.
• Job scheduling: mcron
  • mcron is a rewrite of the venerable cron in Scheme (Guile). Jobs can be declared in Scheme, which allows for programming jobs.

• Local file sharing: woof, python

  FTP is sometimes blocked by routeurs, plus HTTP is more accessible for people running poor systems.

  • woof is very convenient to share single files over HTTP with anyone. It

  also support an upload form so that other people can send you files. woof does not support sharing of directories (without taring them first, that is to say).

  • python also comes with a simple HTTP server:

  python3 -m http.server
  

  or, with Guix:

  guix environment -C -N --ad-hoc python -- python3 -m http.server
  

  The python HTTP server automatically shares the entire current directory.

• Music: Beets, clyrics, cmus, Demlo, Emacs (EMMS), mps-youtube, youtube-viewer
  • clyrics can display the lyrics of the song currently playing in cmus.
  • The cmus music player is extremely fast at updating its database. The curses-based UI is a bit limitating though.
  • Emacs’ EMMS is similar to cmus with the bonus that it is extensible, it can fetch lyrics, it can resume state upon restart and it can display album covers within the music library tree.
  • mps-youtube can build albums from Youtube links automatically and save the resulting playlist locally. Since it’s terminal-based it cannot display thumbnails.
  • youtube-viewer is similar to mps-youtube but its graphical interface can display thumbnails which is very convenient to help the user find a video. I find it less convenient than mps-youtube to build playlists though.
• Network monitors: Aircrack-ng, ngrep, nmap, speedtest-cli, Tcpdump, Wireshark
• News readers: Emacs (elfeed)
  • Elfeed is better at rendering HTML feeds than newsbeuter, it supports image display, it can fuzzy-search everything.
• Package management: Emacs (helm-system-packages), Guix, Stow
  • Guix can be installed on any system. It allows for rollbacks, unprivileged package management, etc. It’s extensible in Scheme (Guile).
  • Helm System Packages is a universal interface to your package manager. It lets you fuzzy-search and execute complex actions over arbitrary selections of packages.
  • GNU Stow is convenient to install packages locally (without using a package manager). I also find it convenient for dotfiles management.
• Picture batch processors: dcraw, Emacs (gif-screencast), gifsicle, GraphicsMagick, ImageMagick, jpegtran (from libjpeg-turbo), optipng
  • dcraw can convert many camera raw formats.
  • GraphicsMagick and ImageMagick are very similar in features and they may be complementary regarding performance.
• Picture editors (Raster graphics): darktable, GIMP, Hugin, Metapixel, RawTherapee
• Picture information: perl-image-exiftool
• Picture viewers: feh, sxiv
  • feh can set the wallpaper. sxiv is very fast at loading and displaying big pictures. It supports GIF animations unlike feh.
• Power usage monitors: powertop
• Programming: cloc
• Programming in C: cppcheck, GDB, mcpp, musl, Splint, TCC, Valgrind, Uncrustify
  • cppcheck and Splint are static analyzers with overlapping features.
  • Uncrustify is much better engineered than GNU Indent and Astyle. See the Indentation rationale.
• Screen capture: scrot
• Screen control: light, xbacklight
  • light works without X as opposed to xbacklight.
• Session locks: slock, vlock, xlockmore, xss-lock
  • slock is as simple as it gets but does not support PAM sessions unlike xlockmore.
  • vlock is for TTY sessions. It is part of the kbd project.
  • xss-lock auto-locks the screen on standby or when the laptop lid is closed.
• Shell: DASH, dtach, Emacs (Eshell), fish, shellcheck
  • DASH is a light, fast and POSIX compliant shell. It is quite limited for interactive use but ideal for testing the POSIX-ness of scripts.
  • dtach detaches the command passed as argument, allowing it to run in the background even after the parent program has been killed. The backgrounded program can be re-attached at any moment to another shell. dtach also works with Eshell.

  • fish departs from the POSIX-derived shells. Bash suffers from the design issues of the venerable Bourne shell (e.g. word-splitting). Zsh has tried to unite all shell languages under one banner, thus becoming complicated beyond reason to the point that the simplest configuration can be an Odyssey on its own. Like rc, fish uses a clear syntax. It also has a straightforward API, which makes it very straighforward to customize and extend. Last but not least, its interactive features are efficient and to the point.

    The lack of POSIX-ness is no problem in practice:

    • Any POSIX shell script will be executed by the interpreter pointed by the shebang.
    • Initialization files such as .profile can still be set up by sh at the beginning of the session: use sh as your login shell and exec fish at the end.

  • Farther down the road of non-POSIX shells, Eshell lies even further: it uses Emacs Lisp as a language which is arguably much more powerful than fish. See my article on Eshell for more good reasons why you should use it.

    Eshell has a very powerful completion framework, pcomplete. As of 2017 the limited popularity of Eshell result in limited support for completion. That being said, it is possible to configure Eshell so that it falls back on the completion of fish, which then makes for a very extensive completion support.

  • shellcheck is a static-analyzer for shell scripts.
• Spreadsheet: Emacs (Org-mode)
  • This Emacs mode lets you write plain text tables (track them with git!) and apply arbitrary functions to cells. These functions are either pre-defined or self-written in Lisp (with ubiquitous support for M-x calc and its arbitrary precision arithmetic). From there you can use every Elisp feature, and if that would not be enough (e.g. too slow) you can call external programs to perform the task, say, your favourite scripting language. This makes the tables infinitely programmable.
• System information: inxi
• System monitors: Emacs (proced, helm-top), htop, iftop, Iotop, lsof, NetHogs, PSmisc
• Task management: Emacs (Org-mode)

  • Org-mode all the way. It can be used as TODO manager, calendar, for document processing, documentation, literate programming, etc.

    I briefly tried Taskwarrior, which file format is plain text but hard to read. The editing is far less convenient than with a proper text editor. This is where the power of using an editor as a user interface really shines. Org-mode is not an Emacs exclusivity, some other editors support it.

• Text editors: Emacs

  Yes, you should use Emacs.

• Text processing: Emacs Lisp, recutils

  Emacs Lisp makes it very convenient to batch-edit text files using its “buffer-editing” model (i.e. scripts can directly reflect interactive editing). I find it often much more efficient to write than AWK scripts, especially with its step-by-step debugging capability.

• Touch-typing: GNU Typist
• Torrent clients: Transmission
  • Transmission is full-featured and offers various UIs: GTK, Qt, curses, and… Emacs! (transmission.el) Beside not supporting magnet links, rtorrent has a poor UI for selecting files and folders manually, which makes it very impractical for large torrents. The Emacs interface brings in its load of usual advantages: extensibility, keyboard-driven, fuzzy-search, macros, etc.
• Transcoding: cdparanoia, dvdbackup, FFmpeg, flac, Gaupol, id3v2, libvpx, MediaInfo, mkvtoolnix, opus, vorbis-tools, wavpack, x264
  • FFmpeg is the swiss-army knife of transcoding: aspect ratio, concat, crop, mixdown, remux, metadata, etc. It is much more efficient to use FFmpeg from a smart custom script than using a GUI.
  • mkvtoolnix can process mkv files in place, e.g. it can instantly change metadata.
  • cdparanoia rips audio CDs.
  • dvdbackup decrypts VOB files.
  • Gaupol is a simple yet complete subtitle editor.
  • MediaInfo displays the media property of pictures, audio and video files (codecs, container, etc.). It overlaps a lot with FFprobe (from FFmpeg), but still manages to provide some details that FFprobe misses.
  • The rest is a set of tools for containers and codecs.
• Translation: translate-shell, Emacs (google-translate)
• Unit conversion: units
• Vector graphics: Asymptote, Graphviz, Inkscape
  • Asymptote is a full-featured descriptive vector graphics renderer. It features libraries for: plots, trees, 3D (with perspective!), and much more. The language is much more convenient (C-style) and far less limited than its competitors (TikZ, Metapost, PSTricks): it has double-precision arithmetic support, control structures, data structures, support for custom structures, etc. It also supersedes Gnuplot.
  • Graphviz is a smart graph drawing tool that will decide automatically of the best arrangement for the vertices and edges.
  • Inkscape can export to LaTeX, which is useful for good and consistent typography in your document.

• Version control: git, Emacs (Magit)

  I use the netrc credential system (from git contrib) to re-use the credentials stored in my ~/.authinfo.gpg when calling git send-email.

• Video: mpv, subdl
  • mpv is a fork of mplayer with fewer dependencies and some additions such as an on-screen display, support for resuming and chapter markers. Both mpv and mplayer allow for very fast video rendering, which can render 1080p videos on lower-end machines where VLC would stutter.
  • subdl will often fetch the right subtitles for the desired language. When it fails to pick the right one, it is still possible to select it manually.
• Virtual machine hypervisors: QEMU
• Web browsers: Emacs (eww), Next, qutebrowser, surfraw, tor-browser, w3m
  • While eww is text-based, it can render variable width/height fonts as well as pictures.
• Web tools: curl, Wget, youtube-dl
  • curl and Wget are overlapping but also very complementary.
  • youtube-dl, as the name does not imply, is not restricted to YouTube.

• Window managers: Emacs (EXWM), Stumpwm

  I’ve used Awesome (extensible in Lua) and i3 (relies on external scripts for extensibility). In the end their extensibility was always too limited for my needs. For instance it’s very hard (impossible?) to search a window by its title and directly focus on it.

  • EXWM is a WM where all windows are Emacs buffers. Consequence: you can fuzzy-select your windows, tile your selection, delete the complementary selection, etc. EXWM is obviously extensible in Emacs Lisp.
  • Stumpwm is 100% extensible in Common Lisp. It’s possibly the most featureful window manager. It’s less integrated to Emacs, which has its ups and downs: a blocking Emacs won’t block everything, but it’s harder to link Emacs content with external applications.