My Software

I am only putting programs I have tested in the long-run here.  

Priorities

I like moving fast on my computer. I prefer terminal apps for the sake of efficiency and simplicity. That being said I will not use a program just to be cool (cmatrix is an exception). I will only use FOSS software. The software must work on my preferred operating system.  

Core

• Operating System
  Artix Linux is a systemd-free fork of Arch Linux. Arch and their derivatives are quite minimal and come only with the base.
  Edit: Gentoo is a highly flexible, source-based Linux distribution.
• Terminal
  st (simple terminal) is a suckless tool and it is one of the most minimal terminal emulators out there. It is also highly customizable but I stick to the defaults as I don’t need much from a terminal emulator other than to emulate the terminal.
  Edit: I no longer use X11 and try to do stuff on the native linux tty, so I do not use any terminal emulators.
  Edit 2: I now use Wayland and am using foot as a terminal emulator.
• Shell
  I didn’t make-my-mind up on which shell to use yet, therefore I will update this page when I choose one.
• GUI
  dwm is a suckless window manager. Together with being minimal and fast it is a tiling window manager. If you never tried a tiling window manager before, you should.
  dmenu is a little suckless tool that… is hard to explain… but if you can use it right it can do miracles.
  Edit: I no longer use X for graphics and I use kms/drm and the Linux Framebuffer for graphics. For some applications such as Firefox I use Weston.
  Edit 2: Using the framebuffer is a pain because of lack of application support and a clipboard. Now I am using the Wayland compositor river.
• Text Editor
  vim: “Less of a text editor and more of a lifestyle.
  Edit: I now use vis instead of vim, the above quote is still relevant. The advantages of vis is that it is less bloat and has a very nice feature called structural regular expression.
• Web Browser
  Vieb is the Vim Inspired Electron Browser. Although I am not sure if I will stick with it, it is fine for now.
  Edit: I don’t use Vieb anymore, I generally try to use lynx, and for graphic heavy websites I just stick to Firefox.\

Utilities

• File Manager
  I don’t use file managers, but you can use PCManFM if you want a GUI file manager.
• Mail Client
  mutt is a efficient mail client. I also sync my mail to offline using isync.
  Edit: I no longer sync my mail using isync, but I may go back to that.\
• Media Player
  mpv. It is the best, don’t bother with anything else.
• RSS Reader
  newsboat is a RSS reader.
  Edit: snownews is a RSS reader.
  Edit 2: newsraft is inspired by newsboat and tries to be its lighter counterpart.
  If you don’t use RSS, you are wrong. You can also subscribe to social media accounts and open them with mpv. See this.
• Password Manager
  pass is a password manager. I also used KeePassXC before which is also good.
  Edit: I now use tpm.

Production

• Video and Audio
  ffmpeg is the swiss army knife of video and audio, there is nothing you can’t do with it: streaming, editing, rendering, converting, and much more.
  Olive & Shotcut are fine if you need to do some fancy editing ( as it is hard to do with only writing ffmpeg commands ), though I do encourage you to think if you need to edit a video or not.
• Writing Documents
  LaTeX is a good solution for making documents, though it is not a very minimal choice ( anything is more minimal than MS Word if you are thinking about it ), I also want to try groff/troff which I heard is a minimal typeset.
  Edit: I have tried groff and it is awesome, use when possible!
• Presentations
  sent is a suckless tool which allows you to make a presentation instantly from a plain text file. Needless to say, it is very fast and cool.
• PDF Viewer
  zathura is a pdf viewer. I used to use mupdf but I wanted to use poppler as I can also use its tools.
• .doc/.docx Editor
  abiword is a document Editor for the MS Word document format. I don’t use this for my own documents, I only open the Word docs other people send to me.
• Image Modification
  GIMP is a Photoshop alternative.
  graphicsmagick is a collection of tools for small & repetitive image modification tasks.
• Download Manager
  aria2 is a download manager. I didn’t use many download managers so I don’t know if it is the best, but I use it.
  youtube-dl is a tool to download content from various sites, such as Youtube, Bandcamp, and other.  

You can probably find the program you are looking for below:

Suckless list of programs that rock
musl-libc alternatives (not alternatives to musl)
Gradient list of minimalist programs.
Gentoo’s list of recommended software

PS: This article is originally published on my school blog.