Original question and text by @HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org
Why software do you use in your day-to-day computing which might not be well-known?
For me, there are
twothree things for personal information management:
for shopping receipts, notes and such, I write them down using vim on a small Gemini PDA with a keyboard. I transfer them via scp to a Raspberry Pi home server on from there to my main PC. Because it runs on Sailfish OS, it also runs calendar (via CalDav) and mail nicely - and without any FAANG server.
for things like manuals and stuff that is needed every few months (“what was just the number of our gas meter?” “what is the process to clean the dishwasher?”) , I have a Gollum Wiki which I have running on my Laptop and the home Raspi server. This is a very simple web wiki which supports several markup languages (like Markdown, MediaWiki, reStructuredText, and Creole), and stores them via git. For me, it is perfect to organize personal information around the home.
for work, I use Zim wiki. It is very nice for collecting and organizing snippets of information.
oh, and I love Inkscape(a powerful vector drawing program), Xournal (a program you can write with a tablet on and annotate PDFs), and Shotwell (a simple photo manager). The great thing about Shotwell is that it supports nicely to filter your photos by quality - and doing that again and again with a critical eye makes you a better photographer.
Draw.io is pretty great for diagrams.
Wiki.js can embed them too.
Syncthing, runs in background, synchronises everything between machines. Use it on my phone, tablet, NAS, desktop, Steam Deck.
This is not a very popular app, but I use it all the time. Full disclosure, this is my own app, but it’s free and open source.
It’s for transferring and managing files and folders over your local network. I use it whenever I need to just ad-hoc move files between things.
It also has an older brother if you need a permanent WebDAV server:
Looks cool! How does it compare to something like Warpinator?
I use droposs.org to handle the family’s games.
Streamlink (with mpv) allows watching Twitch streams with all the benefits of a real media player (like hardware video decoding) and without all the extra junk that occupies the Twitch web interface. It can also stream from YouTube and various other sites, record, and probably has a few more features that I haven’t discovered yet.
autokey — a recent “autohotkey” sort of thing for linux. It comes to mind since I recently had to find a replacement for the one I’d used previously which died of bitrot. Mostly I just use it for app-specific key remapping for Firefox so that I can disable its ^W which I only ever hit accidentally when it was possible.
I have to give a shout to starship.
I’m in the terminal all day, and with all the context switching from interruptions and meetings, having all the terminal context in my face really helps me settle back into the groove.
Sure there are dozens of other ways to do this, but a little config for a hundred different tools, all of which is customizable, makes it a pretty easy choice for me.
I’ll give a second shout for tig. Ncurses git interface with vim-like navigation makes exploring, staging, stashing, etc. super easy and way faster than the CLI. Certainly not a replacement, but a magical enhancement.
I think Cherrytree is my most important app. It’s primarily for making hierarchical lists but you can hyperlink between nodes and to external files and URLs and you can insert files, images and tables. I pretty much use it for organising my entire life and archiving important files, links and documents. The database is a single file (which you can have encrypted), so it’s super portable and you can sync it between devices. You can easily theme it yourself too (the default theme/icons looks quite old school).
I also love GIMP 3.0
I really like logseq for my personal knowledge base, notes, and in general magaging things from to-dos, reading lists or personal projects.
The way you can structure information relationally, and espetially the “referenced from” preview that’s on each page makes it really easy to get an overwiev of something, and the query language to make your of previews (such as, list every unfinished to-do with a deadline this week) makes it a pretty powerfull tool.
Figuring out syncing, especially on mobile, took some time, since it lives in a git repo, but there are some plugins for it on PC and on mobile I just use Termux with CLI git.
Syncplay allows watching movies with remote groups of friends, by synchronizing everyone’s playback and pause buttons. Rather than depending on a streaming service, it depends on everyone having a copy of the movie. I use it with Mumble voice chat, so we can all hear each other’s comments while watching.
I use Fortune a lot at the terminal, even though it’s usefulness is questionable at best.
