[BillingsLUG] Two cool Linux applications I just discovered

[Scott Dowdle]

Greetings,

I started using a couple of new applications this morning that I thought I'd tell you about. Both are in the stock Fedora repos but also probably in other distros as well. They are:

1) terminator - Yet another terminal emulator for X11 but this one is awesome. It is similar to screen and tmux except that you can't detach and reattach... so terminator really isn't for remote machines... but for the local machine it is easy to make all of the vertical and horizontal panes within a single window that you want.  It also supports tabs.  A few features that make this stand out is that it has pane grouping and command broadcast... so if you open up a lot of panes you can ssh to a different remote system in each and then turn on command broadcast so you can run the same command in all of the desired panes.  It also has drag and drop of panes so you can reorganize them although I found that a little buggy and prone to crashes.  The other features that stand out are full-window and zoom. You can take any pane and make it full-window and back again... and there is even a zoom feature that will take the active pane and zoom in on it so it is full-window but proportional... actually zoomed in.  The last awesome feature is that since it is an X11 application, you can use the control+, control- and control0 to alter the font sizes used in an individual pane. I wish screen and/or tmux could do that.  Most of the features are accessed through a hot-key combinations, so make sure you read man page to find out what they are.  BTW, since it is an X11 application, the mouse can be used for switching panes if desired.  So you don't have to hit the same hot-key nine times to move to the ninth pane from where you currently are... you can just click on it.

2) soundconverter - I occasionally find myself converting one audio file format into another.  I usually use oggenc as well as other commandline programs.  soundconverter is a nice GUI application where you can give it directory and tell it what you want all of the files in that directory converted to.  It doesn't include codecs so it only supports what libraries / codecs you already have installed.  One nice feature is that is maintains the tag metadata when converting.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
704 Church Street
Belgrade, MT 59714
(406)388-0827 [home]
(406)994-3931 [work]