====== Useful Programs ======


Here are some sometimes-handy programs:

There are many that I don't even need to shout-out, they're quite well known such as youtube-dl, mpv, ffmpeg, vlc, so on.

===== ncdu =====

A fancier du.
Sometimes, when your disk is almost full, you want to know what is using up the disk space. On Windows, tools like WinDirStat achieve this function.

On GNU/Linux, du will list the space of files used. However, the ncurses version is more useful

<code>ncdu
</code>
It will print out in descending order the list of items using disk space.


===== parallel =====

The actual thread-ripper.
Most programs are single threaded, but most modern systems have multiple cores. Parallel can help you run multiple instances of a program in parallel. This is especially useful when working with inputs and outputs that can be divided and merged later. For example, converting a folder of audio recordings to a different codec, or splitting text to process it in smaller chunks.

GNU Parallel takes in a list of files (or parameters) to give the multiple threads and can queue them. Say you have text files 1-100, parallel can run 8 at once, and when one finishes, queue the next one from the list.

===== rmlint =====

Useful deduplication. Can be set to reflink instead of delete, very handy for unorganized ppl like me w/ tons of duplicates.

example usage:
  rmlint -vv -g -c sh:link .


===== Digikam =====

Very nice photo library and album collection. Includes ability to process raw photos internally or with Rawtherapee. Has some effects built in. Does face-recognition (offline) if trained. Easy to tag and sort stuff. Overall, nice.

It seems to struggle with my 60k photo multi-family setup a bit, but it's probably because I use a shared database on my home server. Easy enough to export an album as jpegs, burn onto a DVD and give to relatives.


===== Nativefier =====

Turn terrible web apps into slightly less terrible electron based apps... Mainframe->individial->mainframe(cloud)->? eventually I guess we'll go back to local compute?


===== Shorter list =====

My expanding list of things I've found handy.

  * Multimedia
    * MPV/VLC
    * Imagemagick/Ffmpeg/Sox
    * yt-dlp (youtube-dl fork)
    * MPD (music) with ncmpcpp or Cantata
    * JXL utilities for JPEG-XL, VPX for VP9, AVIF, AV1
  * Better Unix utilities (Thanks to vmeson/rwmacleod for pointing these ones out)
    * rg (better grep)
    * fd (better find)
  * Filesystems
    * sshfs
    * s3fs
    * zfs
    * btrfs
  * Backup
    * borg
    * growisofs (for multisession DVD/BD backup)
    * ddrescue for generating image of semi-dead disks (or disc)
    * photorec/testdisk for recovery. try it before you need it.