Keep the customers satisfied: Three more graphical apps

The post a week ago mentioning a few non-console programs was well received, so here are a few more I made a note of, but probably wouldn’t pursue personally.

vim users, or at least people who prefer vim’s approach to navigation, will probably like apvlv.

As far as PDF viewers go, it’s delightfully quick and to-the-point. Take a good look at that interface though, because if you’re not already adept at vim, you’ll be a bit stuck for getting started.

But otherwise, command mode and :help do what you would expect, and joy of joys, even things like :tabnew are supported.

Part of me says if you’re a vim fan anyway you probably already have your fingers dipped in another PDF viewer solution. But you can’t go wrong giving this one a try.

Here’s aqualung, which I found … I don’t remember where.

It’s quick and speedy, and unorthodox for a music player. In its AUR version it calls on quite a few dependencies though, and more than one has to be built from another AUR package.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does make me wonder, in the grand scheme of things, if I really need it as a music player when things like Potamus are running quite a bit lighter.

I also must admit (again) my prejudice against applications that try to track and manage music for me. I don’t like it, and I might as well just say it out loud.

On the other hand, this has a nice interface that focuses more on controls and information than sparkle and motion. It’s a no-nonsense application, which I do like.

Altogether, music players are my Achilles heel, and no matter which one I like or try, there’s always another one out there that seems lighter or does more. Shake a tree, and a music player for Linux will fall out. Egad. 🙄

One more, just because three feels natural. Here’s gcstar, which can help you manage your collections.

When I say “collections,” I mean “collections.” Of just about any sort, flavor shape or function. Music collections, stamp collections, video game collections — you name it, this’ll probably handle it for you.

And one of the nice things, as you can see in the screenshot, is that it comes prepared to access online information about, for example, music or other domains, and update your local collection to match.

I can remember keeping stacks of 5 1/4-inch floppy discs organized manually with a C-64 decades ago. I would have given a limb or two for some way to automatically fill categories and minute information.

But that was then, and this is now. The new world expects online databases to feed your local ones, and if it didn’t, it would be a shortcoming. So the nostalgia moment ends now.

I should note that installing this in Arch brought in just about every Perl package that exists; if that’s important to you, consider yourself warned. I don’t think this would be too far beyond the muscle in, for example, a Pentium II machine, but it’s always possible.

That’s good for now. If you see something here that looks appealing, give it a try. 😀