Want to expand your Linux horizons this weekend? I’ve been on the hunt for useful free and open source apps, installing and testing them on my multiple Linux devices. Here are a few I found that are worth considering.
Any given Linux distro has a seemingly endless selection of software in its repositories. It’s all free to install, but it takes time and effort to dig up and dust off the hidden gems. The ones I pulled today I tried to keep varied enough there’s something for everyone: the every-day desktop plant, the Linux gamer, or the command line warrior.
3KMagnifier: Zoom That Doesn’t Suck
KMagnifier, often called KMag for short, is a magnifier app made by the KDE team. The premise is simple: use a small window to show a magnified version of whatever part of screen the mouse is hovering over. It can also simply zoom in or out of the screen as a whole, or specific windows, rather than using the mouse’s guidance. It’s meant as an accessibility tool, but there’s a lot you can do with it other than just assist with sight disabilities.
For one, it’s sort of a mini zooming screenshot tool. At any time with KMag in focus you can hit Ctrl+C and it will copy a PNG image of whatever’s in KMag’s window to your clipboard. You can then paste that in an image editor to save. You might find it a little more convenient than KDE’s screenshot tool, especially if you’re trying to capture small parts of the screen.
Interestingly, KMag also has various color blindness simulators built in. If you activate one, it will show you how elements of the screen would look if you had that color blindness. That can be useful if you’re a visual designer and you want to know how people with color blindness will see your work.
A friend of mine also told me they use the KMag on a computer they keep in the far corner of the room. Sometimes they want to look at something on the small screen without getting up. They control it with a wireless mouse and keyboard, and with KMag activated, they can see details of the screen from far away. In that case, I’d recommend creating a keyboard shortcut that launches KMag so you don’t have to look through an application menu first.
2Moonlight: Don’t Let the Sun Set on Your Games
Moonlightis a set of software that lets you stream your desktop and specific games. Technically, you need to install two separate, uniquely named apps: Sunshine and Moonlight. You need one device, typically a PC, with Sunshine installed and running, making it the “host” server. On whatever device you want to stream to, there you install the actual “Moonlight” app, also known as a client app.
What you get is the ability tostream games running on the host device to the client device. To use the analogy implied in the titles, Sunshine shines its rays, containing your games, across your network and Moonlight “reflects” those rays onto whatever device you want to game on. Clever, right?
If you’re wondering why this would be that useful, let’s say you have a powerful PC that’s capable of playing AAA games. Due to space constraints or an office setup you need to maintain, the PC can’t be moved from one room, but you want to play those games on your living room TV, your phone, tablet, or a laptop. Moonlight lets you keep everything in its place while gaming where you want.
Personally, I have Moonlight setup on a tiny HTPC connected to my living room TV so I can take advantage of my office PC’s better hardware from my living room. No25-foot HDMI cablerequired.
1Taskwarrior: To-Do in the Terminal
Taskwarrior is essentially a to-do list that lives in your terminal. There’s no full-on TUI (though some have attempted to develop one). Instead, you interact with your to-do list entirely by issuing commands. Your database of tasks is stored locally on your computer, and your tasks can be organized into projects and with tags, exported for reports, and set to be recurring.
Once especially nice thing about Taskwarrior is that, though it’s terminal-based, it’s friendly to fuzzy language. For example, if you want to remind yourself to take the trash to the curb this coming Thursday, you’d just use this command:
Taskwarrior will record your task as being due on whatever date the next Thursday falls on.
Let’s also add a task to go get groceries, but instead of a fuzzy day in the future, we specify exactly what day on the calendar.
Now you’re able to see a list of all your outstanding tasks with the list command.
You can see above that each task gets tracked with a numerical ID, the time that’s passed since it was created, and the level of urgency. That’s another interesting feature: Taskwarrior automatically estimates urgency based on the closeness of the due date, what priority level you assigned (if any), and other factors related to how you created the task.
Let’s say instead of reviewing every incomplete task, you only want to know what tasks are due tomorrow. It’s as simple as calling the due:tomorrow filter.
When you’ve completed a task, you use the done command. For example, if task assigned the id 1 is complete, you’d use this command:
I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Taskwarrior is capable of. You can find the package in just about any Linux repository, typically with the name taskwarrior. Install it and start organizing your tasks like true command line warrior.
