I really like Lunatask. It’s a task/habit management app kind of like Todoist, but it works better for me personally. The premium version is quite expensive, but the free one is quite okay to work with. And it’s still in development so a lot of features are missing (you can’t set a time for a task for example which I find ridiculous).
Also Ghostwriter, it’s a really nice minimalistic markdown editor. I wish it was a bit more customizable but I guess I could try emacs for that.
I use CoreCtrl to fix my GPU’s atrocious fan curve, which is a necessity since normally it overheats to high hell. With CoreCtrl, I have a nice fan curve that makes my GPU rarely, if ever, run hotter than 70°C.
I wish it had Nvidia support. Even though I have it installed, it’s useless for me. Currently trying to find a fan control/curve tool/program that works with Nvidia GPU.
For terminal, the first thing I install is Midnight Commander - dual pane file manager. midnight-commander.org
For all of my physical Linux machines - Cockpit and Cockpit-File Sharing plugin.
Desktop
Thunderbird
Firefox
Vivaldi
Gnome
Chromium I use Firefox, wife uses Chromium and My WFH job I use Chrome. Vivaldi is a backup browser, I’ve been messing around with.
QEMU/LibVirtd - So I can run a Windows VM for my old Canon Lide 60 scanner which scans clearly there, otherwise in Linux, it’s contrasted super grey for some reason.
Kopia-UI - Backup system which supports NFS Shares - set and forget type of setup.
VLC - Need I say more? Lol
OnlyOffice - Better aesthetically IMHO than LibreOffice
PDF Arranger - Works well to re-arrange pages or rotate them after scanning them in. (I self host Sterling PDF and will probably switch to that later)
It has shortcuts that feel a little more natural to me and the ootb theming makes files more easy to navigate.
I know you can also theme nano but I’m lazy
Exactly that for me too, I’ve opened multiple bug reports over the years, and IIRC, even Worte with one of the devs. I think it needs a good amount of extra work on connectivity and user feedback to clearly system why something isn’t working
They are called "programs", not "apps". The word "app" was created for the iPhone and originally meant a "mini" slimmed down application meant for mobile devices, not a catch-all term for any user program running on a CPU.
To add, you could have looked this up before posting a hostile comment on a relative newcomer’s post. This is how linux communities develop reputation of being exclusive & unfriendly.
Way to out-pedantize a pedant. Also, wikipedia isn’t exactly a credible source. While I wouldn’t personally split hairs on the use of “app”, TimeSquirrel isn’t wrong in that the use of that short-form wasn’t ubiquitous until the time of smart-phones, and more specifically, the iPhone.
And stuff like this is why Linux communities get a bad rep lol. No one cares that the the term all only came along with the iPhone, it’s a common term now so get used to it.
Emacs is an app platform in and of itself, and the vanilla installation comes with dozens of its own apps pre-installed. Like how web apps are all programmed in JavaScript, Emacs apps are all programmed in Lisp. All Emacs apps are scriptable and composable in Lisp. Unlike on the web, Emacs encourages you to script your apps to automate things yourself.
Emacs apps are all text based, so they all work equally well in both the GUI and the terminal.
Emacs comes with the following apps pre-installed:
a text editor for both prose and computer code
note taking and organizer called Org-mode (sort of like Obsidian, or Logseq)
a file browser and batch file renamer called Dired
a CLI console and terminal emulator
a terminal multiplexer (sort-of like “Tmux”)
a process manager (sort-of like “Htop”)
a simple HTML-only web browser
man-page and info page browser
a wrapper around the Grep and Find CLI tools
a wrapper around SSH called "Tramp"
e-mail client
IRC client
revion control system, including a Git porcelain called "Magit"
It comes also with a doctor, you can invoke it with “M-x doctor”. I discovered Emacs in the 80s, used it a lot in uni in the 90s, Emacs is a religion, or an OS, it’s so powerful it’s incredible. Nowadays I’m mostly using code for coding, or simply nano for small scripts/text.
Too much fun! Like many other Comp. Sci. students, I spent way too many hours trying to get Eliza, an automated psychiatrist from MIT, to say something shocking. Weizenbaum, the developer, “was surprised and shocked that individuals, including his secretary, attributed human-like feelings to the computer program.” In this sense AI is nothing new because Eliza passed the Turing Test in 1967.
Philosophy is a subset of religion, and there is a definitely an Emacs philosophy about making absolutely all software hackable, and controlling the computer using text.
App platforms are a subset of operating systems. People confuse the two because most app platforms are inseparable from the operating system on which they run. But some software, like the Web, or Java, or to some extent .NET/Mono, are app platforms that run the same apps across multiple operating systems. Emacs is an app platform.
Honestly, just download/install from your package manager and then start using it. One of the best built-in modes is called Org mode. Don’t try anything crazy because it’s easy to get overwhelmed. It took me some periods of stopping and starting before things felt natural and became my daily driver.
How do you think one should get started with Emacs? Should they start start with regular GNU Emacs or should they install one of the “distros”?
I always recommend using the default setup for any software. The same goes for learning GIMP, Krita, Blender, FreeCAD, or whatever else, even though you can customize them all to your liking.
It is usually a good idea to try and learn the workflow that was intended by the people who developed this software, you could learn something from trying to use the computer in the same way that the professionals do. Same for Emacs: professional software developers have used it for almost 50 years, the default keyboard shortcuts are set the way they are partially for random historical reasons, but partially because they often make a lot of sense.
If you are interested, please check out my blog series on getting started with Emacs, called Emacs for Professionals
While my solution isn’t perfect (if someone key logged my computer I am very screwed), I think it’s better than (1) have a much higher chance of losing my 2FA tokens altogether (2) put all hope on Bitwarden being not compromised
Add comment