List of applications/Utilities
Utilities
Command shells
See the main article: Command-line shell.
See also Wikipedia:Comparison of command shells.
Terminal emulators
Terminal emulators show a GUI Window that contains a terminal. Most emulate Xterm, which in turn emulates VT102, which emulates typewriter. For further background information, see Wikipedia:Terminal emulator.
For a comprehensive list, see Wikipedia:List of terminal emulators.
- Alacritty — A cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator.
- aterm — Xterm replacement with transparency support. It has been deprecated in favour of urxvt since 2008.
- cool-retro-term — A good looking terminal emulator which mimics the old cathode display.
- CoreTerminal — Terminal emulator based on qtermwidget. Part of C-Suite.
- CuteCom — A graphical serial terminal.
- Deepin Terminal — Terminal emulation application for Deepin desktop.
- Eterm — Terminal emulator intended as a replacement for xterm and designed for the Enlightenment desktop.
- foot — Lightweight terminal emulator for Wayland with sixel support
- Hyper — A terminal with JS/CSS support. Based on the Electron platform.
- moserial — GTK-based serial terminal for the GNOME desktop.
- PuTTY — Highly configurable ssh/telnet/serial console program.
- urxvt — Highly extendable (with Perl) unicode enabled rxvt-clone terminal emulator featuring tabbing, url launching, a Quake style drop-down mode and pseudo-transparency.
- Yakuake — Drop-down terminal (Quake style) emulator based on Konsole.
VTE-based
VTE (Virtual Terminal Emulator) is a widget developed during early GNOME days for use in the GNOME Terminal. It has since given birth to many terminals with similar capabilities.
- kermit — A VTE-based terminal emulator that aims to be simple, fast and effective.
- Pantheon Terminal — A super lightweight, beautiful, and simple terminal emulator. It is designed to be setup with sane defaults and little to no configuration.
KMS-based
The following terminal emulators are based on the kernel mode setting that could be invoked without X.
framebuffer-based
In the GNU/Linux world, the framebuffer can refer to a virtual device in the Linux kernel (fbdev) or the virtual framebuffer system for X (xvfb). This section mainly lists the terminal emulators based on the in-kernel virtual device, i.e. fbdev.
- yaft — A simple terminal emulator for living without X, with UCS2 glyphs, wallpaper and 256color support.
Terminal pagers
See also Wikipedia:Terminal pager.
- less — A program similar to more, but with support for both forward and backward scrolling, as well as partial loading of files.
Terminal multiplexers
See also Wikipedia:Terminal multiplexer.
- mtm — Simple terminal multiplexer with just four commands: change focus, split, close, and screen redraw.
- wezterm — GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer implemented in Rust.
File managers
See also Wikipedia:Comparison of file managers.
Console
- lf — Terminal file manager written in Go using server/client architecture.
- Ranger — Console-based file manager with vi bindings, customizability, and lots of features.
Graphical
- CoreFM — Simple lightweight easy to use file manager with many features like image previews, mime-icon support, split view, auto-mounting of removable media, drag-n-drop support etc. Part of C-Suite.
- https://cubocore.org/ || corefmAUR
- Konqueror — File manager and web browser for the KDE desktop.
- PathFinder — File browser that comes with the FOX toolkit.
Twin-panel
Note that some of these twin-panel file managers can also be set to have only one pane.
- Double Commander — File manager with two panels side by side. It is inspired by Total Commander and features some new ideas.
- https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/ || GTK: doublecmd-gtk2, Qt5: doublecmd-qt5
- trolCommander — Lightweight, dual-pane file manager written in Java. Fork of muCommander.
Trash management
File synchronization and backup
See also Synchronization and backup programs, Wikipedia:Comparison of file synchronization software, and Wikipedia:Comparison of backup software.
- borg — Deduplicating backup program with compression and authenticated encryption that supports backing up over ssh
- Duply — Command-line front-end for duplicity which simplifies running it. It manages backup job settings in profiles and allows to batch execute commands.
- https://www.duply.net/ || duplyAUR
- rclone — Command line program to sync files and directories to and from Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Yandex Disk and many other cloud storage services as well as between local paths.
- Synkron — Application that helps you keep your files and folders always updated. You can easily sync your documents, music or pictures to have their latest versions everywhere.
- YARsync — A Python wrapper around rsync, providing file synchronization and backup with an interface similar to git.
Archiving and compression tools
For archiving and compression command-line tools, see Archiving and compression.
Archive managers
- LXQt File Archiver — Simple and lightweight desktop-agnostic Qt file archiver.
Comparison, diff, merge
See also Wikipedia:Comparison of file comparison tools.
For managing pacnew/pacsave files, specialised tools exist. See Pacnew and Pacsave files#Managing .pac* files.
Console
See from diffutils and its alternatives.
- difftastic — Compares files using their syntax trees
Graphical
- Meld — Visual diff and merge tool that can compare files, directories, and version controlled projects.
Vim and Emacs provide merge functionality with vimdiff and .
Console
See from .
- f2 — Cross-platform command-line tool for batch renaming files and directories quickly and safely, can also rename files based on audio tags.
Graphical
- Caja-Rename — Batch renaming extension for Caja.
File searching
This section lists utilities for file searching based on filename, file path or metadata. For full-text searching, see the next section.
See also Wikipedia:List of search engines#Desktop search engines.
Console
See find(1) from and its alternatives.
Graphical
- KFind — Search tool for KDE to find files by name, type or content. Has internal search and supports locate.
File indexers
These programs index your files to allow for quick searching.
- fsearch — A fast file search utility for Unix-like systems based on GTK 3.
Full-text searching
See from and its alternatives, which provide non-indexed full-text search.
Full-text indexers
- Tracker — All-in-one indexer, search tool and metadata database, used by GNOME Documents, Music, Photos and Videos.
Code forges
Code forge clients
- git-open — Open a repository website (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket) in your browser
Version control systems
See also Wikipedia:Comparison of revision control software.
- Darcs — Distributed revision control system that was designed to replace traditional, centralized source control systems such as CVS and Subversion.
- Subversion — Full-featured centralized version control system originally designed to be a better CVS.
Build automation
See also Wikipedia:List of build automation software.
- Gradle — Powerful build system for the JVM.
Integrated development environments
See also Wikipedia:Comparison of integrated development environments.
For PHP specific list, see PHP#Development tools.
- Aptana Studio — IDE based on Eclipse, but geared towards web development, with support for HTML, CSS, Javascript, Ruby on Rails, PHP, Adobe AIR and others.
- Eric — Full-featured Python and Ruby IDE written in PyQt5.
- MPLAB — IDE for Microchip PIC and dsPIC development.
- Qt Creator — Lightweight, cross-platform C++ integrated development environment with a focus on Qt.
Java IDEs
Educational IDEs
- Processing — Playground for teaching non-programmers the fundamentals of computer programming in a visual context.
Debuggers
- D-Feet — Easy to use D-Bus debugger to inspect D-Bus interfaces of running programs and invoke methods on those interfaces.
- Nemiver — Easy to use standalone C/C++ debugger (GDB front-end) that integrates well in the GNOME environment.
Lexing and parsing
Lex and Yacc are part of POSIX.
- flex — A tool for generating text-scanning programs, alternative to Lex.
And then there are also:
GUI builders
- FLUID — FLTK GUI designer.
- Qt Designer — Tool for designing and building graphical user interfaces (GUIs) with Qt Widgets.
JSON tools
- gron — gron transforms JSON into discrete assignments to make it easier to grep.
- jq — Command-line JSON processor
- the Elvish shell has built-in support for JSON
UML modelers
See also Wikipedia:List of Unified Modeling Language tools.
- Modelio — Modeling environment supporting the main standards: UML, BPMN, MDA, SysML.
- PlantUML — Tool to create UML diagrams from a plain text language.
API documentation browsers
- quickDocs — Fast developer docs reader for reading Valadoc and DevDocs.
Issue tracking systems
- Redmine — A flexible project management web application. Written using the Ruby on Rails, it is cross-platform and cross-database.
See also Git server#Advanced web applications.
Game development
See also Wikipedia:List of game engines.
- LibreSprite — Animated sprite editor and pixel art tool lets you create 2D animations for videogames.
- Unity — Unity is a flexible and powerful development platform for creating multi-platform 3D and 2D games. Proprietary, but a free version is available for certain use-cases (see here for more details).
Repository managers
Character selectors
- GNOME Characters — Character map application for GNOME.
On-screen keyboards
- Maliit Keyboard — Virtual keyboard useful for KDE Plasma-Wayland
- Squeekboard — GTK 3 virtual keyboard for Wayland, written in Rust/C.
Keyboard layout switchers
Keybinding managers
Input methods
See the main article: Input method.
Partitioning tools
Formatting tools
Cloning tools
See Disk cloning.
Mount tools
See also udisks#Mount helpers.
- 9mount — Mount 9p filesystems.
- pmount-safe-removal — Mount removable devices as regular user with safe removal
- https://mywaytoarch.tumblr.com/post/13111098534/pmount-safe-removal-of-usb-device || pmount-safe-removalAUR
Console
- gdu — Disk usage analyzer with console interface written in Go.
Graphical
- Graphical Disk Map — Disk usage analyzer that draws a map of rectangles sized according to file or dir sizes.
Disk health status
File recovery tools
Console
- fclones — Very fast duplicate file Finder written in rust.
Graphical
- BleachBit — Frees disk space and guards your privacy; frees cache, deletes cookies, clears Internet history, shreds temporary files, deletes logs, and discards junk you did not know was there.
- Shredder — Graphical user interface for rmlint.
Disk image writing
See also Wikipedia:List of tools to create Live USB systems.
- GNOME MultiWriter — Write an ISO file to multiple USB devices at once.
- Popsicle — Utility for flashing multiple USB devices in parallel, written in Rust.
Task managers
- Deepin System Monitor — Monitor system process status for Deepin desktop.
- btop — Rewrite of bpytop in C++
- LXTask — Lightweight task manager for LXDE.
- https://wiki.lxde.org/en/LXTask[dead link 2022-09-20 ⓘ] || lxtask
System monitors
See also Category:Monitoring.
- Collectd — Simple, extensible system monitoring daemon based on rrdtool. It has a small footprint and can be set up either stand-alone or as a server/client application.
- Sysstat — Collection of resource monitoring tools: iostat, isag, mpstat, pidstat, sadf, sar.
Hardware sensor monitoring
Console
- dmidecode — It reports information about your system's hardware as described in your system BIOS according to the SMBIOS/DMI standard.
- neofetch — A fast, highly customizable system info script that supports displaying images with w3m.
Graphical
- i-Nex — An application that gathers information for hardware components available on your system and displays it using an user interface similar to the popular Windows tool CPU-Z.
System log viewers
- MATE System Log — System log viewer for MATE.
Font viewers
See also Wikipedia:Font management software.
- Fonty Python — Manage, view and find your fonts.
Help viewers
Command schedulers
See also Cron.
- KCron — Tool for KDE to run applications in the background at regular intervals. It is a graphical interface to the Cron command.
- https://apps.kde.org/kcron/[dead link 2022-09-20 ⓘ] || kcron
Shutdown timers
Clock synchronization
See Time synchronization.
Screen management
Backlight management
Color management
Printer management
Bluetooth management
See Bluetooth#Front-ends.
Power management
System management
Boot management
Package management
Configuration management
- cdist — Simple configuration management system with Arch Linux support.
- https://www.cdi.st/ || cdistAUR
Virtualization
See Libvirt#Client and VirtualBox.