Motho ke motho ka botho

I tend to be even more wishy-washy about software than I am about hardware. I’m usually quite willing to try out new applications, mostly because some stuff appeals to me, but others don’t quite hit the mark. Human nature, I suppose.

On top of that I’m a minimalist, and so I tend to have some very clear-cut rules about what I like in software.

1. Do one thing, and one thing only. Flexibility is one thing, but trying to do too much at once is a dealbreaker for me. I don’t want, for example, music management software suites. I manage the music. The application plays it — period. Don’t try to be all things at once because you’ll just end up disappointing me.
2. Do that one thing well. If a program has a focus, that’s great. If it achieves that focus without muddling the final product, that’s ideal. If you can’t do it right, don’t bother doing it at all.
3. Don’t burden my system with pointless libraries and dependencies that don’t add anything to your program. Some of the best software I’ve ever seen has about two dependencies. Some of the worst drags in all of Gnome just to put a button on the screen. Inexcusable.
4. Finally, points are awarded for style. I tend to forgive ugly programs that achieve in the first three categories. But if you snag all three and have a clever interface, or just a smooth look, I embrace thee through the power of the Internets.

That being said here are some current standouts. Like I said, this list will change from time to time, so it’s possible that I’ll find something new and glitzy, and drop an old favorite without thinking twice.

Openbox

For my money there’s nothing faster or better than Openbox. My life changed for the better when I stopped relying on Gnome and all its immensity to do the simple task of interacting with me. And I learned a lot more too, when I stopped using it. If you want to understand Linux and get to know it up close and personal, find a window manager that makes you learn. Openbox will do that.

The newest versions (3.4.4 at the time of this writing) are impressive and full-featured. Theming is easier now, behavior management is better and even funny gimmicks — like removing the window decorations from a program every time it’s started — are handled without too much effort, and just a little elbow grease. Other window managers have their own fan clubs; I’m planted firmly in Openbox’s.

ObMenu

The downside of Openbox is that it’s still a bit cumbersome to handle on-the-fly. Applications like ObMenu, which gives you a method for editing the right-click menu without typing a single bracket, are a godsend. Openbox makes everything easier and faster, and ObMenu makes Openbox easier and faster.

Dependencywise it can do the job with only Python and a few of its derivatives. And the time saved over hand-editing menu files is immense. No Openbox user should run without it.

gtk+ 2.0 Change Theme

Along the same lines, changing the GTK2 theme is essential regardless of your distro, otherwise you end up pretending it’s still 1996. gtk-theme-switch will do it for you, but it’s a bit clunky and feels like something your kid brother wrote for a junior high school computer class. (Sorry, it gives me that impression, anyway.)

gtk+ 2.0 Change Theme does it much more professionally and efficiently. Previews are immediate and font changes are handled in their own submenu. You can try out all the menu and button effects without leaving the main screen and apply them at the same time.

Best of all, it compiles in a snap, which may or may not be important to you depending on the distro. I think it has become commonplace enough that many distributions keep a package of it somewhere; I know it’s in the repos for Ubuntu 7.10, so that’s a good sign.

Kazehakase

For some people, Firefox is the only possible browser solution. Working with older machines has introduced me to a lot of other ones that never get mentioned because they live in Firefox’s shadow.

Fortunately, once you start tinkering with alternatives to Firefox, you realize there are some programs that do the job just as well, and without Firefox’s immense bloat. Kazehakase is my darling right now, mostly because it’s a great deal faster than Firefox and can do just about anything the ‘fox can — including Flash, Java and so forth.

It’s not for everybody — some people will never be able to survive without their precious plugins — but I have yet to hear of anyone who tried Kazehakase, made a point to learn it, and then went back to Firefox. I’m sure it has happened, but re-defectors are hard to find. Trust me: It’s worth trying, and learning.

Audacious

A lifetime ago, once I figured out what an mp3 was, I quickly found Winamp. And in the ten-plus years since then (I think my first version was 1.2), I have yet to find a better way of handling audio playback. When I moved to Linux I found XMMS, then Beep Media Player, and finally Audacious.

Audacious doesn’t manage your audio library. It doesn’t arrange and rename your files automagically, although the provision is there, if you want it. It doesn’t have fancy flip-style album cover browsing or eight ways of categorizing and resorting your music.

Audacious plays your music, playlist-style, and lets you worry about micromanaging it. And that, to me, is a huge improvement over the newfangled wannabe music manager suites. Those things are greasy kid’s stuff. Give me an audio player that’s easy to use and does that job well. That’s all I want.

emelFM2

File managers are my Achilles heel. I have brief and fleeting love affairs with file managers, only to dump them at the first sight of something different. I’ve embraced Thunar, PCManFM, Xfe, mc and a few others in the past, and so my endorsement of one particular application here is probably worth zilch.

All the same, I really like emelFM2 (right now). It is another incredibly complex program that I (right now) find powerful and flexible. I like the two-pane window arrangement (right now), which hearkens all the way back to the late 1980s and the classic Norton Commander utility. That style is nothing new, but emelFM2 adds enough flair and ease of use to keep me interested (right now).

Kidding aside, it is a very clean, very sharp file manager that follows your GTK2 theme and icon theme closely, so it doesn’t look out of place. And it does have an impressive depth (in other words, it’s complex and extensible) for a program that really just moves things around. This is a program you’ll want to spend an hour setting up just the way you like it … and then, months later, dread a full system reinstall because you know how much work you put into configuring it.

Recorder

I was, for a long time, a fan of PyBurn, a creation of Judd Vinet’s and an amazing example of terse, clean code that does an exceptional job burning audio, data and ISOs to CD.

PyBurn’s only real shortcoming, of course, was the fact that it didn’t handle DVDs. If I needed to write to a DVD, I ended up using something else, depending on the desktop and machine I was using. And then … a new challenger appears!

I don’t want to say Recorder is PyBurn, but it’s obvious that the two are interrelated, if not a complete offshoot. Both are easy to handle, take up no space, and do the job exactly right.

Recorder is a nice improvement over PyBurn simply because it does a few more things — DVD burning is possible, it can make ISOs from discs, and it’s actively updated, with the developer taking points and suggestions off an Arch forum thread. It’s always good to be able to make suggestions directly to the source, rather than through intermediaries.

Regardless, take a few seconds to install it; it should run nicely from within any distro that has a current copy of PyGTK installed, and the underlying CD/DVD-burner packages.

Leafpad

Text editors are either too sparse or too complex. In most cases, I don’t need a full coding application, replete with syntax highlighting, FTP accessibility and folding nested commands. In fact, I usually only need to adjust a configuration file, or perhaps keep a simple list of names or numbers.

In that sense, Leafpad is perfect for me. It looks and runs almost exactly like the Windows Notepad (which I don’t hold any love for), but has enough of a Linux feel about it to make you forgive that fact. For a long time it was plagued with an annoying search-and-replace bug, but recent versions seem to have ironed out that wrinkle.

Regardless, if you’re just editing a text file, tinkering with your conky configuration, making a shopping list … but not rewriting the kernel from scratch, Leafpad can probably get the job done with a minimal overhead and an acceptable number of features. Keep it on hand for easy editing, and relegate the larger coding sessions to something like Geany or Bluefish.

Zim

I can guarantee you will have one or two reactions to Zim: Either you will immediately latch on to it and make it your favorite application of all time, or you’ll uninstall it two minutes after you try it.

Whatever happens, Zim is noteworthy because it’s a great little desktop wiki application that’s actively developed. Another pure GTK2 application, you can install Zim without bogging down your system with weird and wayward packages clinging to the hull like barnacles. It looks good, it runs good, it’s dreadfully easy to figure out, and it has just enough embellishments to keep it from becoming a fancified Leafpad.

And as one last endorsement, Zim is what I use to create the Ubuntu speed guides for Feisty and Gutsy. Believe me, it makes things infinitely easier.

Mirage

Another program that is frequently updated on my system is Mirage, and that says to me that the people behind Mirage are actually working on it, and with regular success. Image viewers for Linux are almost as prolific as music players — the running joke is, if you must learn a new programming language, you can do us all a favor and not code another music player. Or for that matter, image viewer.

Mirage stands out for me because of the points I made at the top of the page: It does one thing, it does it well, and it doesn’t drag in a huge glut of dependencies when I install it. It also scores the hat trick by looking good while it does it — it picks up your current GTK2 theme and follows suit, with the addition of an image preview sidebar and a status bar. It’s the standout example of my ideal program.

Everyone has their favorite image viewer, and some of them are quite good. But for sheer simplicity, efficiency and an attractive layout, Mirage gets a perfect score from me.

ePDFView

A while back, when I was still harping about the downward spiral of Xubuntu, the mailing lists were resounding with arguments as to why ePDFView — which is a particularly lightweight PDF viewer, as you might have guessed from its name — was omitted in favor of some other PDF viewer (I forget what it was; it was probably Evince).

The reply at the time was that ePDFView wasn’t being actively developed, but I think that was an error. The tracker page suggests there was a new release in February, and patches were accepted as recently as November. I believe perhaps the Xubuntu team had other reasons for avoiding it. I can guess to those.

But all of that is moot point. ePDFView is a great GTK2 PDF viewer that, like Mirage, does one thing, does it well and doesn’t encumber my system with garbage. There again is the trifecta for any application to me. And while it’s an exceedingly svelte interface, it’s definitely not ugly.

So if you’re looking for examples of standout software and my opinion is important to you (okay, wait a second while I stop laughing ), take a look at both ePDFView and Mirage.

Sylpheed

I don’t have extravagant e-mail requirements, but I do keep three or four e-mail addresses for different reasons, and it’s much more convenient to check them all at once than to sign in and out of web-based e-mail services. To that end, Sylpheed is more than enough to get the job done.

I know everyone has their own favorite e-mail client, whether it’s Evolution or Thunderbird or console-based or something in between. For my money, Sylpheed does what I need it to do (poll four GMail addresses every 10 minutes), and has a simple interface to decode. I know it’s a lot more powerful than I give it credit for, but I only have a few e-mail chores, and it accomplishes those very neatly. I’ll explore the other options if I ever need to.

In summary: Light, speedy, easy to use and good-looking too. Two thumbs up.

Xpad

Quite possibly one of the simplest programs you’ll find, it’s terribly useful and after a while, a compulsive note-taker’s nightmare. Xpad is one of many sticky-note programs, but I prefer this one for being light, speedy and free of ancillary dependencies.

There are no print options, there are no formatting options, there are no search options, there are no page setup options … it’s just a note-jotting program, free of frilly garbage or silly pointless preferences. Simple, clean, light … perfect.

Osmo

I didn’t know I was addicted to Osmo until I lost some of my configuration files after a reinstall, and realized I had quite a bit of information added to it. And of course, it was all gone.

Osmo is like that: It creeps up on you and grabs you when you’re not looking, probably because it fills a lot of other gaps in the applications I’ve mentioned. All the little “accessories” that are sometimes added in a full desktop environment have a happy home in Osmo.

It’s an organizer and a schedule and a task manager and a contact manager and … so forth. It’s very powerful, like emelfm2, but also very simple to manage and navigate. It meshes neatly with Sylpheed and with Kazehakase, so you don’t have to worry about configuring between other programs.

Now, I know I said I like programs that do one thing, and one thing only. Osmo is flexible, but it still follows that rule. There’s a series of calendars and date calculators, alongside the task list and schedule manager. So those aren’t frilly extras, as much as they are useful tools and utilities. Those things make using Osmo all the more speedy and convenient.

I give Osmo a hearty endorsement just as a nifty task manager, and even more for being attractive, simple, clean, speedy and simple. Arch users can presently compile out of AUR, Ubuntu users should check out this tutorial to build it from scratch.

Sakura

One last item: a tabbed, GTK2 terminal emulator. Sakura is simple, clean, easy to configure and pretty to look at. The only downside is that you will probably have to compile it yourself, since it doesn’t seem to be a fixture yet in some distros.

It’s worth the time and effort though. I like a lot of other terminal emulators — rxvt-unicode, for example, is a fantastic alternative — but Sakura has the look and feel of exactly what I want. It’s almost fun to use, and it doesn’t require a ton of junk to get the job done.

If you’re already using something like xfce4-terminal or maybe eterm, Sakura probably won’t impress you. But if a terminal emulator is really just a tool for console applications, Sakura might be preferable just on the grounds of ease-of-use. Try it and see.