Toolbox
12 March, 2014
Please, allow me to start this one with a smart quote, to let you know what will follow:
Show me what's the output of your '
ls /usr/bin', and I'll tell you who you are ... — Nobody (because that's freakin' stupid)
That being said, we can move on. I'll keep this article updated in time, because it's more than an article. It's a list. A list of the tools I use (or have used maybe) daily, and that I think are worth mentioning. You'll find tools written by me, or by other. Shell scripts, or compiled program. Everything that I find 'nice'.
Those tools are (most of the time) not important or complex enough to get a dedicated post, so I'll just write a paragraph here about them. If you feel that one of them require a bigger description, email me and I'll consider writing an article about it.
Let's start with my current setup ! Every tool in this list is installed on my main computer (a desktop one). I'll avoid mentioning server administration tools, because that's too specific.
Computer
- CRUX 3.0
- AMD A10-5800k
- Nvidia GeForce GTx 650 Ti
- Roccat Kone Pure
- Razer Vespuala
Tool list
2bwm
It means Two borders window manager
. This is my WM of choice. It is a
fork of mcwm, but the author, Venam, added so
many feature that it became a new tool.
2bwm is a floating WM. It means that your computer will never change the window geometry if you don't ask him (but tilling WM will).
With 2bwm, you can resize window horiz/vertically, or grow them keeping aspect ratio. You can move them in any direction, or gut them in the corners or in the middle, all that, just with your keyboard !
I personnally forked it myself to add a specific feature: window groups. It works kinda like traditionnal workspaces, except that you can show or hide them independently, allowing you to show multiple workspaces at the same time. See a showcase here.
9menu
Here is a simple, yet powerfull menu application. 9menu allows you to create static menus to launch your favorite applications. Users of the *box WM, or FVWM will relate to this.
The advantages of 9menu over other applications like thingmenu is that you can leave it running in the background, iconify it, bring it back, and teleport it.
Another good advantage (but you can totally live without it), is the ability of
9menu to act as an interpreter, so that you can write your menu using the
shebang: #!/usr/bin/9menu
bar
Bar (or (b)ar (a)in't (r)ecursive) is a lightweight status bar application written on top of XCB. You can pipe text to it, and it will be displayed within the bar. You can also use escape sequences to add colored backgrounds, foregrounds or underlining.
It allow the use of complex scripts to get a tons of infos within that thin, lovely bar.
dtach
I often see newbies asking this question:
newbie — How can I move one application from one terminal to another ?
stranger1 — you need screen.
stranger2 — tmux is better !
stranger1 — How so ?
stranger3 — It has vertical splits !
stranger2 — It's scriptable
newbie — how does it works ?
stranger1 — There is a vsplit patch fro screen
stranger3 — Yes but ...
str...
The problem here, is that screen AND tmux are terminal MULTIPLEXER. Their main job is to give access to multiple terminals within a PHYSICAL terminal. The possibility to detach and reattach them is just a feature.
But that feature was so good, that a small team wrote a tool with ONLY the ability to detach an application, and reattach it somewhere else. Here came dtach.
The advantages of dtach are its small size, (not only the code, because it only
depends on glibc), and that you don't have to remember a million commands.
There is one only bind: ^\ to detach the process. You can also disable this
key and use signals to detach it from elsewhere.
I personnaly use it to reattach to my irssi session, as it's the only application I need on a remote server. You will also be able to send an application from one screen/tmux session to another. Isn't that cool ?
fcount
That is a tool I made. It is REALLY DUMB, but totally usefull in a particular case.
fcount counts the number of files within a directory. NOTHING.
F**KING. MORE.
It's basically a "ls -rAa1 | wc -l" within one process.
I agree that you can find stupid to use a program like that, but within a script that will be executed every second to display the number of unread mails in a status bar, it is usefull to gain some miliseconds. Take it or not, this is your choice.
hsetroot
LINK (dead)
I like this one. This is a tool to display images on the root window (humans: understand "change wallpaper"). You can fit/expand/tile images, create gradients, add tint to images... Everything you could want to do with a wallpaper can be done with it. And it's light as I like ! Forget that crappy feh ! You can barely get rid of the .fehbg that pisses you off !
ii
Okay, I don't use it that often.
II stands for Irc It, and is a filesystem based irc client. Upon starting, ii
will create a file hierarchy looking like this:
$ tree irc/irc.oftc.net/
irc/
├── irc.oftc.net
│ ├── int
│ ├── out
│ └── #shblah
│ ├── int
│ └── out
└── irc.iotek.org
├── in
├── nickserv
│ ├── in
│ └── out
├── out
└── #wizards
├── in
└── out
The first folder is the server, and the subfolders are the channels which you
are connected to. The 'in' and 'out' files are named pipes that you can read
from and write to to interact with servers/channels.
Example:
echo "Hi, people of shblah!" > irc/irc.oftc.net/\#shblah/in
Will effectively send a message to the channel "#shblah" on server "irc.oftc.net".
I agree that this is not the most practical client you've used, but it's a simple and good unix tool. I use it within a tiny script along with a tool of mine (ptii) to get a quick access to the IRC without having to fire up irssi with 4 server connection, 10 channel autojoins, and such..
meh
I've spit on feh before (see hsetroot. I have effectively some problems with it. Feh is impossible to use. it displays the images in full size, no matter what the window size is. And that's freaking annoying... I just want my image viewer to display an image at the maximum size for the window, and to resize when I change the window size.
That is what meh does. And (almost) nothing more ! Meh take a list of images as arguments, and fits them in its window. Meh can also read a list from stdin. You can then cycle through images using h,j,k,l,left,down,up,right.
When you press <enter>, meh outputs the current image name to stdout. It
allows cool stuffs like meh *.jpg | xargs rm to delete the images upon
pressing <enter>.
popup
This is just a simple script that uses my fork of bar to display a small notification bar at the top left hand corner of your desktop.
prout
Did you notice? If you want to send a document to the printer configured to /etc/client.conf using the lp command, you need (at least, on Archlinux) to install the full cups server! That's a shame, isn't it?
That's the reason why I wrote prout. The only dependency is libcups. This tool only sends a file given as argument to the default printer. Nothing else. You can't actually send options along with the document, but I'm not sure that I want to implement this feature...
Anyway, this is pretty neat to me! I hope you'll enjoy it.
skroll
Here is something I wrote for fun. I don't actually need it, but other might find it useful. Skroll takes its input from stdin, and then makes it scroll on stdout. You can specify the scroll speed, as well as the number of characters to be displayed.
The best application to this I can find so far, is for some kind of notification system. If you want to display the current playing song in a tiny box in the upper left had-corner, you soon notice that you can't adapt the notification box to the size of the input text, because that's just too ugly. And here comes skroll ! Just pipe your text to it with the -r flag (so that there is a new line after each scroll-step), and pipe that output to dzen2 or bar or whatever. BAM that's black magic !
thingmenu
Thingmenu is one of those app you've never heard of, but you use (or have used) daily, because it was part of a WM.
It is a simple tool that help you associate some strings with commands, and stack them up in a menu. It comes with a nice script that is able to deal with submenus and "back" buttons, that you can easily improve to fit your own needs.
Also, feel free to browse the whole git repo, it's full of good stuff !
wendy
Wendy makes my life better. I first wrote it as an exercise to learn inotify, but it turned out to be a good replacement to inotifywait.
Wendy let you watch a directory/file and execute a command when a watched event is received. As an example is worth a thousand explications, there you go:
# watch mail directory for new mails and raise an alert
wendy -C ~/var/mail/INBOX/new -t 60 -e beep
# automatic recompilation
wendy -M wendy.c -e make
Every inotify mask can be used, and they can be combined (eg, whatch creation AND modification).
I tried to make this tool the most simple possible, to extend the possibilities. Be creative!