What Linux "Productivity" (ideally FOSS) tools do you use?

I’m in a bit of a productivity rut and whilst I suspect the issue is mainly between the keyboard and chair I’m also interested in what (FOSS) tools there are that people find effective.

One of my issues at the moment is cross managing different workstreams particularly with personal projects which are more in the “if I have time category”.

I’m interested in anything that helps manage time or limit distractions or anything that makes it easier to keep track of progress/next steps for project when there may be a bit of a time gap between.

Feathercrown,

Honestly Obsidian or a similar note-taking app is enough for me. It has a KanBan plugin if you like using that, otherwise just use bulleted lists.

abbiistabbii,
@abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Obsidian is amazing and more people should use it.

Scrath,

It’s not foss unfortunately and the license prohibits its free usage in a company

LemonLord,
@LemonLord@endlesstalk.org avatar

At the moment they are “don’t be evil”. It’s easy to access all your data in a folder with md files. I like Obsidian and use it on all devices with syncthing. Of course private use. In the long run I will migrate to emacs with my notes. But it’s one of my favorites at this time, too. But of course FOSS will be always free and fair.

JoYo,
@JoYo@lemmy.ml avatar

joplin has allowed me to be a lot more flexible with managing and viewing my sheet music.

i converted my notes pretty easily and now i have access to them on all my devices.

Azzk1kr,

I just wished Joplin would store notes as some kind of plain text, like Obsidian does. I’ve also been trying out AppFlowy, which looks kinda promising (and Foss), but it stores notes in a db as well.

Fisch,
@Fisch@lemmy.ml avatar

Joplin does store the notes as plain text files, they’re just named after IDs, so you can’t tell which note is which

RockyC,
@RockyC@fosstodon.org avatar

@JoYo @zerakith is my second brain. I store damn near everything in there. The only thing I wish it did better was tables.

JoYo,
@JoYo@lemmy.ml avatar

I mainly use joplin for tables. it can’t do equations but for set lists and repertoire it’s much easier to use than anything else i’ve tried.

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/02e84990-9b3b-418b-9303-e45b8be85999.png

RockyC,
@RockyC@fosstodon.org avatar

@JoYo I do use tables in Joplin, but when they get large, dealing with them in markdown becomes unwieldy.

Fubarberry,
@Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz avatar

I use Gnome as my main DE, so I use the Pop shell for automatic window tiling. It’s not being actively maintained anymore while Pop works on their new DE, but it still works pretty great. I have my eye on Veshell which is an upcoming DE from the guy who made the Material Shell overhaul for Gnome. It’s a significant change to the UX compared to any other DEs I’ve tried.

My main productivity work is making vector files for a laser cutter, so I use a combination of Inkscape and Lightburn (not FOSS) for that. I also use Openscad and Prusa Slicer for making various repair parts, but that’s not usually paying work.

On the terminal side I prefer fish and kakoune. Kakoune’s changes to the vim/neovim keybinds are a lot more intuitive and easier to learn imo, but come with the obvious downside of learning something less universally useful than the vim keybinds.

MetricIsRight,

Thank you for reminding me of Material Shell, I tried it years ago on an older build of Zorin OS and it crashed constantly. Excited to give it another whirl, and great to see he’s working on the same concept with a new implementation,

yieldsfalsehood,

I capture all my predictable work items in icalendar-encoded files that I mostly author by hand in emacs. I use evolution for a conventional calendar view on my computer. I adb push to my phone and use icsx5 to import so I can view events there as well.

I’ve also been working on a project to produce a printable view that’s reasonably mature at this point. It accepts VEVENT, VJOURNAL, and VTODO entries and groups them by day, month, or year. Todo items are rendered as lists so I have a little circle to fill in when I’ve completed the work. I display both the title and description for all types, with the description processed as Markdown. So for instance a VJOURNAL with a weekly recurrence, a title like “This Week”, and a description like * n* n will appear every week in the printout as a blank list for jotting down two items not captured in my calendars.

I’ve been using the daily grouping so far to produce a weekly “checklist”. Every few weeks or so I hack on my RRULEs based on what’s working for me. For instance I bake a loaf of sourdough every week so I have events for feeding the starter, mixing the dough, then baking. I set each of those to recur on subsequent days of the week so they all magically fall into place then I shifted the start days around until I found my ideal baking day. I also have an entry for changing the bed sheets every week, and another for washing the washing machine scheduled for the same day of week at a slower frequency. Capturing everything that needs to be done (with some editorializing on granularity) and evolving their recurrences is the fundamental way I synchronize independent work, leaning on icalendar for expressiveness like this recurrence for planting the garden on the Saturday before Memorial Day weekend:


<span style="color:#323232;">RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=5;BYDAY=SA;BYMONTHDAY=16,17,18,19,20,21,22
</span>

The workflow doesn’t require the bespoke tooling since I can see all my maintenance items alongside my meetings using any application that can render icalendar. That was key to getting moving, but having the print out lets me feel more productive. I knock out all the routine stuff throughout the day and find that “if I have time” becomes “what do I want to do with this time”.

There are tools in the project for generating events for solstices and equinoxes as well as sunrises and sunsets. I include all of those in my printed daily view but exclude the sunrises and sunsets from evolution by capturing them in separate files. I also separate routine/noisy tasks like “change the bed sheets” from holidays and operational work like “plant the garden” or “change the water filters” so those become more visible.

Kata1yst,
@Kata1yst@kbin.social avatar

Zettlr for technical writing into any format.

Obsidian for a second brain based on the molecular notes method. And yes, I've tried all of the FOSS alternatives. None are ready to replace Obsidian yet.

Wallabag for saving resources offline for easy and permanent reference.

Lunarvim for actually sitting down to work instead of fiddling with and optimizing my setup.

spacebot3000,
@spacebot3000@lemmy.world avatar

I’m with you on obsidian. Logseq comes close, but the app falls a bit short for me as of yet.

CaptainPedantic,

I haven’t tried Obsidian, but I use Logseq all the time. What do you think is holding Logseq back? I’m just curious.

I know for me the mobile app lacks some polish and it lacks plugins, which is annoying.

PlexSheep,
@PlexSheep@feddit.de avatar

Plugin support is a huge thing, obsidian does this so good. Also, tags are pretty cool, not sure if logseq has them. Do I remember correctly that Logseq does not store your stuff in a pure mix of markdown and directories, or was that another App?

CaptainPedantic,

Logseq has tags. Logseq does store data in markdown files. There’s one file for each page.

qaz,

Are you perhaps thinking about Anytype?

spacebot3000,
@spacebot3000@lemmy.world avatar

Honestly, I just found the android app incredibly clunky and annoying to navigate. I’m hoping it’ll improve with time, because I would like to move to a FOSS solution.

coffeejunky,

I tried obsidian, but the Android app is pretty terrible. So in the end I still use Google keep. I would definitely like a more open Foss option, but haven’t found one that works on Linux and Android that I like.

Corgana,
@Corgana@startrek.website avatar

I’ve been interested in Anytype, it’s supposed to be like Notion, which I haven’t used either. You might want to check it out. I’m also trying to get away from Google Keep.

shadowintheday2,

Just wish obsidian had better encryption support

Dehydrated,

You can use Cryptomator to encrypt your entire Obsidian Vault

nephs,

Logseq may help?

I keep a few entries in the content page, for each project, and in each page I got an updated todo list.

You can also capture everything in the same place, journal style, then link it back from the content pages. I find it very powerful.

And it’s FOSS. And md/filesystem based, so I just sync it between devices with git.

crony,
@crony@lemmy.cronyakatsuki.xyz avatar

Neovim and markdown

ViaFedi,

Obsidian flatpak with network disabled

dessalines,

Not FOSS unfortunately.

ViaFedi,

Therefore disable networking…

zerakith,

Useful, I’m open to non-FOSS if I really have to and no networking helps.

njordomir,

Nextcloud Calendar is where I’m blocking out my time. I use a proprietary task app with a Linux client because tasks.org/former Astrid/nextcloud tasks isn’t quite there yet… for me. If I was creating a system to keep me on track today, I would center the whole thing on Nextcloud. The one thing I despise about nextcloud is how it handled locales and formats. There is no easy way to move to YYYY-MM-DD and HH-DD without messing up other stuff like day of the week captions language. The thing I love about nextcloud is how it doesn’t spam you with garbage recommendations and clutter and such like Outlook.

jbd,

I use emacs, Denote, and markdown-mode to keep a loose Zettlekasten archive of notes.

femboy_bird,

Try out a tiling wm (i use i3/sway) they are much easier to focus in than a regular de

zerakith,

It’s on the list to try. I briefly tried i3 but couldn’t get on with it. Though that was a bad time to try change as there was a lot of deadlines and I didn’t really have the time to learn. I have a bit more time so I’m going to try again.

catguy,
@catguy@mastodon.social avatar

@zerakith thunderbird and obsdian I know it's not foss but it's really good. As well as vs codium

TheAnonymouseJoker, (edited )

FZF in Bash. For those wondering why Ctrl+R does not work in Terminal, web.archive.org/…/fzf-ctlr-r-not-triggering-histo…

And to avoid all the web browser player BS, use yt-dlp for any video link or worthwhile playlist. I just search and fetch video links from Invidious, or read comments on videos, so it ends up with practically zero bandwidth load on instance owners.

UNWILLING_PARTICIPANT,

Was going to say fzf - it’s a huge help for so many CLI activities, but especially searching history

massive_bereavement,
@massive_bereavement@kbin.social avatar

I send links from my browser to freetube, which is fantastic.

TheAnonymouseJoker,

For some reason I never found FreeTube working, or able to import my NewPipe .db file in it. So I use Newpipe on Android, and on Linux/Windows, Invidious links + yt-dlp. Works too well since years now.

zerakith,

Avoiding going on yt is definitely a plus. I am trying to move more to active choice of music rather than just what the algorithm is pushing. Obviously that requires upfront work but I think it’s worth it.

TheAnonymouseJoker,

You may find yourself better suited with a throwaway free Spotify account, letting the algorithm suggest bands and songs based on your taste, and just noting down all of them. Spotify also allows exporting your account’s data, which includes music preferences, so that can work well. I am doing the same because it is just not feasible to discover by yourself.

squid_slime,
@squid_slime@lemmy.world avatar

Sway really sped things up for me. Also using ble.sh helps with bash. Then custom scripts and aliases in bashrc.

tom42,
@tom42@lemmy.world avatar

A combination of different.

For brainstorming Logseq is great, for tasks I use CalDAV in combination with Thunderbird and JTX Board (Android) a lot.

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