I still have a few low-profile graphical applications stacked up, found during some of my distro-surfing late last year. Both are audio-video editors, which are only vaguely useful to me.
It’s true I do, on occasion, have use for an audio editor. It’s rare, but probably once a year it comes in handy.
On the other hand, I have needed a video editor … let’s see, let me think about it … okay, I’ve got it: never in my entire life. 😉
So my opinions on these two are relatively uneducated. Take them for what they are worth; my interest in them is that they appear to run lighter than some other options.
Here’s mhwaveedit:
I’ve been through audio editors from as far back as my Windows 98 days, and I really can’t give much more than opinion than the superficial.
This is arranged neatly, it’s fairly easy to figure out, and it seems to have enough options to make it useful. I have most of the common codecs installed on this Arch system, so opening and editing a file was a piece of cake.
I also like the right-side sliders, to control the axis and range of the sound diagram, and the playback speed. It has a few other straightforward tools.
I know there are bigger, heavier suites out there — and not just for Linux. So the audiophiles in the audience may find mhwaveedit less than complete.
On the other hand, if you just need to trim out an audio clip and you don’t want to monopolize a dual core machine for a small task, this will do the trick.
I am a mere interloper with audio editors, but I am a complete neophyte when it comes to video editing. I came across avidemux last month, and it was interesting.
Most of the tools and options available here are completely foreign to me. I had a little trouble finding a file it could open, but that might be an issue of codecs or file compatibility. I don’t know for sure.
Once I got it moving though, it was fun to mess with. Call me childish, but it was fun to skip through the video frame-by-frame. 😳 🙄
And I should mention that there is a CLI version that handles many of its functions as text flags, to include things like normalizing files. That might be handy.
Whether or not avidemux is full-featured enough for your needs is for you to determine. I mention it because it’s considerably lighter than much of the software usually mentioned for video editing.
Keeping in mind, of course, that both of these will probably require some auxiliary libraries to use, and that might complicate your otherwise lightweight lifestyle. Be careful. … 😈
Motho ke motho ka botho 
I always found it weird that Linux was lacking so much in the video/audio editing field compared to OS X and Windows.
It’s stable, fast and secure. What more do you need when doing large scale editing?
And don’t tell me a film editor isn’t technologically savvy enough to step away from OS X/Windows 😀
@Adrian
A well known company markets its computers and software as ‘industry standard’ in the music production/audio area with great success. Students learn on that software, and audio hardware companies provide controllers, interfaces &c that are geared to the requirements and workflow…
Leading edge software (for the people who DON’T want to be ‘industry standard’) IS developed on FOSS platforms, see supercollider, pure data, ChucK and fluxus. Look at the puredyne linux distribution for a simple way of getting all this stuff pre-configured.
Audio support on linux is also a little less straight forward (OSS, ALSA, Pulseaudio, Jack and so on) which tends to put people off.
This little audio editor is interesting because its very simple. Linux audio in my opinion sometimes suffers from the nuclear sledgehammer based nutcracker problem.
Yep, mhwaveedit is great — I switched to it from Audacity a while ago. The two big selling points for me is that it works properly with JACK, and it handles big files gracefully.
For video editing I normally use gopdit, which is one of those “does one thing well” tools (topping-and-tailing MPEG video).