Lightweight, Intuitive and Minimalistic software for UNIX-like systems
This is something sort of a personal list of desktop software that I find most appealing to me from a certain standpoint I described in the name of the list. This list mostly contains apps made with Linux/Unix-like systems in mind, but I don't plan to include stuff that rely on specific desktop environments and distros, so apps from this list are mostly multi-platform. Warning - this list contains command line-based apps and tools that not every person can find use for
Simple, but powerful video player with minimal GUI, can be used keyboard-only thanks to shortcuts.
User-friendly command-line system monitor
Features a free draw tool, arrows, lines, circles, and other tools for editing screenshots you take. Possibility to add text, but not possible to change text size. Screenshots can be uploaded to Imgur, saved to a local file, or copied directly to your clipboard to easily paste in other programs. Many configuration options are available, such as hiding icons or changing the colors used in the program. Flameshot is also open source, so experienced developers can help improve the program.
imv is a minimalistic image viewer intended for use with tiling window managers. (added here unstead of feh because of wayland support and better defaults)
Newsboat is a command-line rss/atom feed reader, pretty simple, but feature-rich. Requires manual configuration by creating and editing "urls" and "config" files.
Thunar is a default modern file manager for the Xfce Desktop Environment. It uses some of xcfe dependencies but it's one of the most lightweight graphical ones and just gets the job done
Make command line easier
Kitty is extensible, configurable and full-featured terminal emulator, but also it's minimalistic out of box, just that most more advanced features are activated by shortcuts, terminal commands and editing config file.
Micro is a terminal-based text editor that aims to be easy to use and intuitive, while also taking advantage of the full capabilities of modern terminals. It comes as one single, batteries-included, static binary with no dependencies, and you can download and use it right now.
As the name indicates, micro aims to be somewhat of a successor to the nano editor by being easy to install and use in a pinch, but micro also aims to be enjoyable to use full time, whether you work in the terminal because you prefer it (like me), or because you need to (over ssh).
Features
- Easy to Use: Micro's number one feature is being easy to install (it's just a static binary with no dependencies) and easy to use.
- Highly Customizable: Use a simple JSON format to configure your options and rebind keys to your liking. If you need more power, you can use Lua to configure the editor further.
- Colors and Highlighting: Micro supports over 75 languages and has 7 default colorschemes to choose from. Micro supports 16, 256, and truecolor themes. Syntax files and colorschemes are also very simple to make.
- Multiple Cursors: Micro has support for Sublime-style multiple cursors, giving you lots of editing power directly in your terminal.
- Plugin System: Micro supports a full-blown plugin system. Plugins are written in Lua and there is a plugin manager to automatically download and install your plugins for you.
- Common Keybindings: Micro's keybindings are what you would expect from a simple-to-use editor. You can also rebind any of the bindings without problem in the bindings.json file.
- Mouse Support: Micro has full support for the mouse. This means you can click and drag to select text, double click select by word, and triple click to select by line.
- Terminal Emulator: Run a real interactive shell from within micro. You could open up a split with code on one side and bash on the other – all from within micro.
Simplified and community-driven man pages
exa is a modern replacement for the command-line program ls that ships with Unix and Linux operating systems. It shows list of files in a directory.
Downloaders
Command line app to download videos from Youtube and a lot of other websites.
gallery-dl is a command-line program to download image galleries and collections from several image hosting sites (see https://github.com/mikf/gallery-dl/blob/master/docs/supportedsites.md for full list). It is a cross-platform tool with many configuration options and powerful filenaming capabilities.
Part of my MPV description I moved it here:
You can watch online video from links with MPV, but if you want to use it to play Youtube videos I recommend installing yt-dlp (see in Downloaders) and: For Linux - create file at ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf , then add script-opts=ytdl_hook-ytdl_path=/bin/yt-dlp to it, replace end of the line after "=" to your yt-dlp installation path if needed) For Windows - rename "yt-dlp.exe" to "youtube-dl.exe" and put it in mpv folder This will replace built-in Youtube-dl, which will allow to bypass throttling