Tech
3 cool Linux apps to try this weekend (November 28
You can get more out of your Linux PC with the right software. I know from experience, though, that can be hard to find. Fortunately for you, I’ve found a few more free and open source Linux tools worth trying out this weekend.
Lately I’ve been editing configuration files, scanning documents, and finding new ways to track my music listening habits without the help of Spotify. As you’re about to find out, there are dedicated Linux applications that make all of those tasks and projects easier.
bat: The cat command takes flight
One of the first commands you probably learned when you got started using the Linux terminal was the cat command. It’s handy for quickly checking the contents of a file, plus combining the contents of multiple files. Simple stuff, right?
What if that simple experience could be improved in smart ways while remaining lean and nimble? That’s what the bat command attempts to do, giving you all the same capabilities but with features that make it better than cat.
For one thing, bat gives you line numbers by default, which can be useful in identifying the location of commonly edited Linux configuration files. For another, it features syntax highlighting that can make understanding what you’re reading a lot easier. That highlighting is customizable too.
bat also automatically uses a pager as necessary (though you can define a “necessary” number of lines for this), and it plays nice in pipelines as well. It’s a highly flexible replacement for a very common Linux command.
I’ve sometimes found bat preinstalled on Linux distributions, but you can still check to confirm it’s installed with one of these commands:
sudo apt install bat #Debian and Ubuntu
sudo dnf install bat #Fedora
sudo pacman -S bat #Arch
sudo zypper install bat #openSUSEI noticed that in Debian and Ubuntu, bat‘s executable and man page have been renamed to batcat to avoid conflicts with a different package. In that case, you’ll have to either get used to typing batcat or just make an alias for batcat called bat.
NAPS2: Scan documents and make them searchable
Do you have physical documents you need to scan into your PC? Do you ever wish you could easily search or copy the text from those documents? There are several ways you can do that on Linux, but one of the most simple and stress-free solutions that doesn’t require any work in the command line is NAPS2.
The name stands for Not Another PDF Scanner 2, and it’s a multi-tool for scanning documents with built-in support for OCR processing. That means it can automatically identify text and make it highlightable, copy-able, and searchable, and it’s able to do this in over 100 languages.
Giving it a try, it took me just seconds to convert images I’d taken with my phone of a book title page, crop it, turn it black and white, and save it as a PDF with searchable text that anyone with a PDF viewer can open.
You Should Try This Open-Source Document Converter
Pandoc can convert between Word documents, Markdown, LibreOffice files, HTML, and many other formats.
You can get the app by visiting the NAPS2 download page where you’ll find it in DEB, RPM, and Flatpak form. On Arch, you can get it from the AUR as well with the yay -S naps2 command.
Turntable: Simple and beautiful music scrobbling
I just got into scrobbling my music with Last.fm, but I ran into a problem: Last.fm’s app isn’t supported on Linux. I have to connect to various third-party clients to track my listening habits. What’s worse, my favorite way to stream music, Jellyfin, has no first-party integration for scrobbling. A workaround I found is using Turntable.
The Turntable app bills itself as “your favorite music app’s favorite music app” because it lets you use any number of MPRIS-supporting music players—be it an offline player, a streaming app, or your web browser—and automatically updates your profile on Last.fm, ListenBrainz, Libre.fm, or Maloja. You can also use the app to control your music playback.
It’s also a very flexible application. The window size and layout can be adjusted in several different ways, with unique animation and other artwork effects. If you don’t want a window at all, Turntable can also be run as a service in the background using a terminal command.
You can find Turntable on Flathub or just install it from the command line with this Flatpak command:
flatpak install flathub dev.geopjr.Turntable
By the way, I had trouble with the Flatpak application initially. It threw a weird error message about tokens on launch. If you see that too, know that I was able to fix it by running this command:
flatpak override --user --talk-name=org.freedesktop.secrets dev.geopjr.Turntable
From what I read, it seems this application works best on GNOME, while I was using KDE Plasma. Hopefully you don’t run into any problems, because this is a useful app for anyone who enjoys scrobbling music.
If none of the apps I wrote about today are useful to you, then you should check out last week’s list of notable Linux apps. It included a file manager, image writer, and text-to-speech application.
