List some software that you consider as being essential

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26 Oct 2010, 1:36 am

Speaking generically, I consider editors essential. If they didn't exist, they would have to be created to get anything else done.

ruveyn

Orwell
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26 Oct 2010, 1:41 am

Johannes wrote:

GNU Emacs, of course

And any decent web browser, preferrably Chromium/Chrome.

Real men use Vim.

Or GVim, in my case.

I've taken to using Evolution as my mail client lately. It's a bit nicer than Thunderbird in that it has integrated calendar, addess book, task lists, etc. Also it can connect to Exchange servers.

I have a new must-have LaTeX editor: Gummi, written in C/GTK+. Very nice, and the first proper GTK LaTeX editor, while previously all the good ones were Qt-based.

WxMaxima is the better and cheaper version of Mathematica (fun fact: Mathematica started life as a knock-off of Macsyma, an ancient version of Maxima).

Of course you have to have Compiz for spinny cubes, burning windows, and other effects.

ssh is important for working on someone else's cluster.

Sadly, the Sun/Oracle JRE is a necessary software component. There are some sloppily-written Java applets out there that don't work with OpenJDK.

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auntblabby
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26 Oct 2010, 1:50 am

sound forge
pristine sounds 2000
cool edit pro
munoise
sound forge noise reduction tools
virtos noise wizard noise reduction tools
acon digital media audio restoration tools
sound laundry
dcart millenium
dart pro XP
PSP audio tools
acoustica
magix audio cleaner 10
spectral retouch

Moog
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26 Oct 2010, 1:11 pm

notepad
paint
winamp
firefox

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26 Oct 2010, 8:03 pm

GCC, LLVM, iChat, Safari, LEX/FLEX/YACC/BISON, Mail, NASM, LD, Textmate, Xcode.

Mosh
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26 Oct 2010, 9:00 pm

Firefox + Adblock/Noscript
Adobe Reader
7zip
Microsoft Office
Adobe Flash Player
Anti-virus
Gimp
Skype

lau
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27 Oct 2010, 2:06 pm

It would appear that, on this machine, I find 2,434 packages out of the 25,708 available (freely, and within minutes) rather useful.

I have to say that I've not really used kxstitch - except to see what it was like - so maybe I could drop that one.

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27 Oct 2010, 7:29 pm

lau wrote:

It would appear that, on this machine, I find 2,434 packages out of the 25,708 available (freely, and within minutes) rather useful.

I only have 1654 installed (out of 32116 available). Presumably I could lower that number significantly; the default Ubuntu install includes a lot of cruft that I don't need but haven't bothered to delete. My Debian box has under 1000 packages installed.

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Johannes
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28 Oct 2010, 5:58 am

Orwell wrote:

Johannes wrote:

GNU Emacs, of course

And any decent web browser, preferrably Chromium/Chrome.

Real men use Vim.

Or GVim, in my case.

I used Vim until I realized Emacs is better. There is a great article explaining its advantages. I can't post links yet, but you should find it with a Web search for zack "from vim to emacs part 2".
Emacs with vimpulse.el is the best of both worlds.

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28 Oct 2010, 1:01 pm

Maybe; I've never really used emacs. I have a somewhat non-standard keyboard layout (Macbook) so the emacs command shortcuts are very awkward. I didn't even get through the tutorial before I decided it wasn't worth it.

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lau
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28 Oct 2010, 7:14 pm

Orwell wrote:

lau wrote:

It would appear that, on this machine, I find 2,434 packages out of the 25,708 available (freely, and within minutes) rather useful.

To an extent, I would acknowledge that some of my packages might be things I'm not actively using.

Some reasons why I have a lot of stuff installed...

I'm a programmer... I have a lot of languages and tools installed.
I've done a fair amount with network stuff.
I'm a mathematician.
I like to play the odd game.
I like to help people who are having difficulties with software I don't happen to use myself. I'll install it to see what the problem is.
Although I use Gnome, I also like a few utilities that need KDE stuff.
I dabble.

The main reason, though, is that I have no need to remove anything I have installed over the years. Why should I?

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Johannes
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30 Oct 2010, 8:28 am

Orwell wrote:

You can have Vim keybindings in Emacs with vimpulse.el. That's the great thing about Emacs; you can make it do whatever you want.

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30 Oct 2010, 8:45 am

FF
Skype
Pidgin
Irssi

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30 Oct 2010, 1:30 pm

Orwell wrote:

Remapping the control key to caps lock is something a lot of Emacs people recommend, so there would definitely be a way to remap keys to something more convenient if you want.

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