scripts:useful_programs

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scripts:useful_programs [2022-04-12 19:10] – Tonyscripts:useful_programs [2025-03-19 07:04] (current) – Tony
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 +====== 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.
 +
 +===== zed =====
 +
 +it's like vscode but substantially faster at parsing everything.
 +bonus has copilot support and remote sessions like vscode
 +
 +
 +===== gdu =====
 +
 +it's like ncdu but in golang and substantially faster on solid state
 +
 +old recommendation:
 +==== 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 .
 +  
 +  
 +shoutout to fclones which is faster on ssd but on hdd makes my hard drives sound like they are dying
 +
 +
 +===== 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 =====
 +
 +RIP. this one is no more. PWA is not the same.
 +
 +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.
  
  • scripts/useful_programs.txt
  • Last modified: 2025-03-19 07:04
  • by Tony