Toolbox

Some things I found to be useful for daily programming.

Programming

Geany: very fast IDE, not the memory and CPU monsters out there like Eclipse/Netbeans.
Valgrind: code analysis tool, I use mainly the memory checker and the profiler.
KCachegrind: graphical profiler presenting runs of valgrind performance checks in a nice way.
xxdiff: 2 and 3-way graphical diff tool, I use it because of nostalgia (aka: I got used to it).

XMLStarlet: XML processing on the command line for fast and dirty XML processing
JQ: JSON processing on the command line very much alike as with XMLStarlet

openSUSE Build Service: for building release packages in the cloud.
Travis CI: for continuous integration on Mac OSX.
Using libvirtd now instead of VirtualBox (sorry, Oracle). Main reason: it’s still a little bit un-ready round the edges but hey, it’s really open source. :-)
LXC: lightweight and surely nicer to use than Docker (IMHO). Still a little bit alpha quality though.
unison: file synchronizer, I’m using it since years to sync my home directory between three or four machines, sort of a very easy backup.
The backup from the local LAN to the cloud happens via FTP and some copy jobs within Bacula.

The Pragmatic Programmer: an absolute must for every programmer.
The Mythical Man-Month: an absolute must for everybody doing a project.
AntiPatterns: Refactoring Software, Architectures, and Projects in Crisis: avoid mistakes by learing from bad examples.

Ion3: tiling window manager with strong keyboard and Lua scripting support. Sadly the original author got into fights with the open source community :-(
I’m currently using the fork Notion.
Read http://raboof.github.io/notion/ if you want to learn how to use such a window manager.
Joe: my editor for all quick editing jobs. Having used a lot of Wordstar in my youth, jstar is the editor I can’t get rid of in my brain. :-)
meh: as fast and easy an image viewer can possibly get.
MuPDF: an equally fast PDF/XPS viewer.
Trojitá: a simplistic and really fast mail reader for IMAP accounts. For long-term archiving of email I’m using Mutt with POP3 and a maildir directory (proved to be extremely stable over time).
Luakit: webkit-based browser, highly customizable with Lua scripting
Librewolf: fork of Firefox, without all the built-in stuff from Mozilla nobody needs or asked for.
irssi: for chatting (terminal)
newsboat: a RSS feed reader looking like mutt
Wordgrinder: really nice text editor if actually all you want to do is writting some text

The following tools I used in the past, but not anymore:

Seamonkey: Seamonkey slowly gets all the “features” of Mozilla (slow, Rust build problems, out-of-memory when building and linking). So I lost interest in it. I replaced it with Luakit and mutt/trojita, irssi, etc..