On Sun, 28 Sept 2025 at 02:58, Evan Leibovitch via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote:
First and foremost, the ghostty terminal emulator. It's a remarkable improvement over the stock KDE or GNOME terminal app that many of us use. Also available for MacOS; yazi, a text-based file manager that will display graphic thumbnails under ghostty and kitty; neovim, a modern update of the traditional Unix text editor fd which does what find does but faster and easier; fastfetch for a quick and useful system snapshot; you'd never think that someone could improve on `cd` but zoxide is exactly that and finally fzf, a "fuzzy" file finder
Maybe none of these are new to folks here. But I'm just discovering them now, and encourage others to have a look. There may be other software yet to impress me, I'd love to know what others have discovered.
I _highly_ recommend people try out zoxide. It's a bit of a PITA to set up (well ... you have to go in and edit your shell start-up file), but for a heavy shell user it's a game-changing update to the `cd` utility. (I don't like the expression "game-changing" much - I don't use it lightly.) Unlike Hugh, the idea of image thumbnails in the terminal appeals to me. What I'm forced to conclude was that I "chose wrong" when I chose `alacritty` as my terminal several years ago. I mostly picked it because A) I don't like Gnome Terminal and B) it's a reasonable terminal that runs under both X and Wayland. But it doesn't support images. <sigh> Probably going to have to change terminals again. Vim won the `vi` clone wars, and pretty much ended them by 2015 (anyone else remember `vile` and `elvis`?). But Vim's code-base is (or at least was) crufty and had old, dead code. Bram Moolenaar (the primary Vim maintainer) was apparently also quite resistant to the addition of new features. This led to the NeoVim fork - the code base was cleaned up, and multiple new and useful features were used (without changing the basic expected behaviours). I switched years ago, and haven't looked back. I think it's been good for Vim too, as it forced Moolenaar to realize that he was losing users to this upstart project so he started moving forward more quickly. I think it's probably too little too late, but that fight isn't over yet. Bibliography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_(text_editor)#Neovim -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com