I thought about starting a thread with recommendations for useful software tools for any stuff you do. Can be related to developing, or any other activity. Either something you’ve been using for years or just freshly discovered.
So I’m going to start with barrier. I’ve just started using it last week. It let’s you project your mouse and keyboard to a different computer. When I move my mouse to the edge of my leftmost screen on the desk, it appears on the laptop (which conveniently stands next to that) and takes the keyboard with it. So basically a software KVM switcher without the video. Works cross-platform and has clipboard support.
Now I can easily type an answer in IRC running on the laptop without switching keyboards.
I use Guake as my primary terminal. Having the easy button-press for it to appear and disappear is really nice. That said, it’s not super well-featured on KDE (which my work machine uses), since it’s really designed for GNOME.
Radamsa. This tool is seriously so cool and there is no end to the black magic it can do.
It creates “borked” similar output to an input, so if you give it say, a json file, it will create versions of this text that it THINKS might crash whatever your software is. I use it to find bugs in crappy Chinese security cameras, and it did a fairly good job trying some interesting inputs. If you have an API, or something where you hand wrote your parser and/or validator, have your own file format, or many other use case, this tool can help you find lots of bugs very very quickly.
I used to use Guake all the time but I switched to Terminology a while back for better color scheme / theme support. I also like how it does tiling and tabs.
Another thing you may already know: I use KDE Connect, since quite a long time now. It works on most platforms (not only Linux, Windows too).
Two devices in the same network have to run it and be paired (à la Bluetooth), then you can transfer files, use the mouse/keyboard of one device on another, receive notifications, play/stop multimedia, run commands on your PC, and more.
I’ve been using WT-NMP for a little over 8 years now. It’s been running in the background and has never been an issue. It’s great for a little server stack with a simple gui, love it!
I use clipboard managers a lot, under Linux and Windows I use CopyQ, works also under OS X and under Android I use Clip Stack, both are Open Source.
As a terminal I often use Hyper based on Electron, besides tabs, you can also split windows horizontal and vertical, under Linux, Windows (no more scattered cmd windows ), also works under OS X.
As a file manager I use Double Commander a Total Commander/Norton Commander clone, also Open Source.
As a password manager, I switched from KeePass to Bitwarden, which keeps the password file stored in the cloud (also works off-line), because I kept having sync problems with my KeePass file on my Dropbox, also Open Source.
), also works under OS X.