Desktop Programs I Use in 2024

Today I wanted to share the programs I use. This seems to change every few years and I thought it'd be fun to track it and look back at the tools I used at a later time. For this list, I'm obviously not going to include every little package and utility I have installed like 'ls' or 'man' - that would be insane. I also won't list the programs I use for work (ie Teams, Chromium, etc), or the tools I have installed for the network technologies program I'm in (ie PacketTracer, Wireshark, etc).

I use the GNOME Desktop Environment and also won't include all the GNOME utilities like Document Scanner or GNOME Screenshot. Currently, I'm using the Arch-based distribution EndeavourOS as my operating system.

As you can see, I rely mostly on terminal-based applications for my non-work related computing tasks. The benefit of terminal applications is that they're typically faster, more powerful, more configurable than GUI applications, and generally more fun to use.

• LibreWolf - I could probably (and may eventually) write an entire post about LibreWolf. It's a fork of Firefox without all the useless features, with an emphasis on privacy and security. The two essential extensions I use is uBlock Origin and Vimium.
• Kitty - my terminal emulator of choice. There's probably a better one out there, and maybe one day I'll try something else, but I love how tabs are integrated. I usually have several tabs open and switch between then with Alt+h and Alt+l.
• cmus - my music library manager, probably the best music application I've ever used.
• mpv - a media player with a minimal GUI. It plays just about everything I throw at it.
• ranger - a text-based file manager with vim key-bindings.
• newsboat - a fast RSS reader. In addition to handling a standard RSS/Atom feeds, I've configured it to either download or open YouTube videos in mpv.
• vim - my text editor of choice. In fact, this website's content, HTML, and CSS is managed/written in vim.
• epr - a CLI EPUB reader.
• w3m - terminal-based web browser. Super useful for using text-focused websites like brutalist.report, alterslash.org, hn, and DuckDuckGo Lite.
• mutt - text-based email client. I still fall back on Thunderbird for those emails with HTML that don't seem to open properly from mutt.
• yt-dlp - Ripping YouTube videos and other things. Very useful when connected to newsboat, or when I want to rip a video to save locally.
• rtorrent - a BitTorrent client.
• ffmpeg - The gold standard for converting/reencoding media files.
• htop - system process monitor and manager.
• zathura - lightweight PDF viewer (with the MuPDF plugin), it has vim-like key-bindings.
• sxiv - a simple image viewer.
• SpeedCrunch - a scientific calculator with a keyboard driven interface.
• KeePassXC - a local password manager.
• OnlyOffice - An office suite with high compatibility with MS Office filetypes. Outside of work and school, I really only use the Spreadsheet functionality, but I've been considering switching to Gnumeric.
• sc-im - an ncurses based, vim-like spreadsheet calculator. This is a great terminal based spreadsheet program, but it's really unintuitive for me to use and takes me a bit to do simple calculations.
• calcurse - A text-based calendar and to-do application. I stopped using calcurse because I couldn't get it to sync properly with my email provider's CalDAV.
• pass - a terminal based password manager. It worked fantastically until I had issues with gpg. I may return to using this some day.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to send comments, questions, or recommendations to hey@chuck.is.