Good GUI software. Outta TUI into GUI

I'm not a keyboard warrior anymore. I'm not doing (almost) everything in the terminal anymore, this thread is for sharing and namedropping good GUI software. Can be sort of a desktop thread for workstations that don't look like a GitS Navi outta da m4tr1x with Lazerhawk on ncmpcpp. To me, clicking around with a USB gamepad is more ergonomic than hjkl sitting straight on a F1 chair; programming + GUI software feels like the dumbphone + tablet combo instead of smartphone. Automate what can be automated, and have a fine GUI for what cannot. Still, there's good things about the TUI or CLI that's good to see in GUI, like fully customizable kb shortcuts, lightweight and extensibility with plugins. I'm new to this, I've been in the terminal for years, but here's some good graphical software that I've found: >Thunderbird (mail) >liferea (rss) >cantata (mpd) >emacs + spacemacs >transmission-qt (bt) >qbittorrent (for the torrent search) >qutebrowser and midori (www) >okular (pdf) >gpodder (podcasts) >filezilla (ftp) >geogebra (math and plotting) >audacity and ardour (audio editing) >redshift (less eyefuck) I'm missing a WM (using i3 for now), network auditing software (maybe CLI is better for this).

>>15419 >I'm missing a WM (using i3 for now) echo "emacs" > ~/.xsession >emacs (∞) >gnus (mail) (rss) (pod) >emms (mpd) >erc (irc) >eww (www) >pdf-tools (pdf) >tramp (ftp) >mentor (bt) >mpv + xwidget (mpv) >ess (math & plotting) >super-collider (audio editing) >...

You used the terminal for pdfs before? I just did it for the first time and it looks pretty neat but the lack of images makes it unusable many times. >QuiteRSS (rss) >Deluge (bt) >Mupdf (pdf)

>>15421 Can you post on here with eww?

>>15419 Command-line warrior too, I miss my BSD days. Been in the game so long, I just use the mac gui tools to do my job, dreaming of the day I can toss it all. The best software can done in terminal and in GUI. GUI for the beginners, terminal for the upper echelon. On a related note, we should have stuck with the mainframes.

>>15427 It doesn't seem so, mostly because I don't see a means to open a form in a new buffer (although knowing emacs there is probably a way I just haven't found yet). I'm sort of in the middle of transitioning everything over to emacs from a more traditional unix workflow (w3m, irssi, tmux, vi, mutt, etc) so far I've only switched over everything I use but mutt, mpv, & w3m. (so just emacs, evil, evil-collection, erc, & pdf-tools). I know there are a few alternatives though like the Xwidget based webkit browser which is just a typical browser in emacs and emacs-w3m which is just a wrapper around w3m.

>>15438 Shame, it's a neat little web browser. I've had the same process where emacs sucked up all my other programs once I started using it. Thanks for the evil-collection tip - losing vim keybindings in some buffers was pretty annoying. >>15419 >I'm missing a WM (using i3 for now) I always come back to openbox. It is simple and reliable; behaves like a regular WM but retaining the best of a tiling WM (keyboard shortcuts for workspaces and arranging / resizing windows). I find a tiling WM is only useful for terminals, but tmux or emacs already takes care of that.

>>15439 >Shame, it's a neat little web browser. Yah, it's similar to doc-view in this way, really close but just not quite there from the looks of it. >I've had the same process where emacs sucked up all my other programs once I started using it. Emacs unifying the way I do computing is actually one of the main reason I decided to switch. Having a single way to switch between gui/tui applications, a unified configuration/programming system, a unified set of ergonomic key-bindings, well integrated applications (for example having notes in org mode link to pdf pages), etc, seemed to make it well worth the switching cost. The other primary reason being a greater amount of functionality and a easier means of extending functionality. >Thanks for the evil-collection tip - losing vim key-bindings in some buffers was pretty annoying. It's always nice to hear someone benefits from your words. I'll consider making a emacs thread here to mirror the elisp thread in /lambda/ so that this type of thing can happen more often. I'll wait until I'm more established in the ecosystem though unless someone else decides to make it first.

>>15423 I sometimes use ranger's pdf viewer for previewing if I'm sifting through pdfs with meaningless titles, and I tried Enlightenment's project terminal emulator, called Terminology wich can clunkyly open pdfs. I even used to do that in the virtual console, even more 1337 than a terminal emulator, but now I just use Okular or zathura. >>15429 Then, what even is a terminal? Graphical terminal emulators can even render video nowadays. So yeah, I could totally picture even an audio editor embedded in the terminal emulator. But for text only, I'll take audacity over splitting files manually with ffmpeg. And then use ffmpeg for automation, that's good stuff. >>15438 I think you can post here with links or elinks or lynx, maybe open that on emacs' terminal emulator. >>15439 Thanks for reminding me about openbox, I tried it ages ago but didn't like it because it wasn't rice enough. I may like it now. >>15440 (not that lain) What I don't like about integrating everything into emacs is that when I develop some software for myself it will only be useful to other emacs users. I'm into python+qt for programming. I'd have to make TUI or CLI software to make them compatible between emacs junkies and normal people. >having notes in org mode link to pdf pages *drool

>>15457 >What I don't like about integrating everything into emacs is that when I develop some software for myself it will only be useful to other emacs users. I'm into python+qt for programming. I'd have to make TUI or CLI software to make them compatible between emacs junkies and normal people. I'm not really sure of the usability but the "Emacs Application Framework" was made for just this! I stumbled upon it when searching for a way to integrate watching videos: https://github.com/manateelazycat/emacs-application-framework That being said I'm still unsure I'd suggest others try to make emacs a OS. The lack of peformant applications, sane defaults, and complete functionality means it's quite time consuming to make things work properly.

>>15461 So it's like WINE for emacs, sounds fun if it works. fuarrrk the UNIX philosophy even further. This practically turns emacs into a WM, in most seriousness, except for programs that aren't pyqt. This is what I get for making a GUI thread on lainchan. (love you lains) >The lack of peformant applications Question for big time emacs users: what's some stuff you couldn't find a way to do within emacs and you have to make do without, or do with some other program? >sane defaults Isn't there an emacs plugin (I don't remember if it was a layer or a config or what) called sane-defaults? I like spacemacs myself.

Now I get why people say linux is difficult. If one can supercustomize emacs, program an arduino to scratch your balls and play doom on a toaster then the normal person click around stuff should be easy enough to get, right? I thought so, but after trying out some "just-works" software, it turns out that nothing just-works, at least on Arch. Maybe stuff just works on distros that are made for just-works programs but this shouldn't need an OS reinstall. Out of the seven or eight dock bar programs that I tried, only two of them just "worked", tint2 and docky. You can't do anything fancy with them, but at least they didn't crash and bug. I couldn't find a good GUI file manager, Thunar was doable but that's it. And so on. I'm not just bitchin about how people should make free software for me, I'm just shocked at how easy it is to do hard stuff on linux, and how hard it is to get into the easy things, if you don't just install ubuntu and use the defaults. Can you really have high customizability AND point-and-click ease of use? Maybe GUI emacs is up there, but point n click isn't even required for a text editor/IDE. It's been a long time since I've felt the lurking ghost of distrohopping, but now it's not towards an even nerdier distro.

>>15838 >Out of the seven or eight dock bar programs that I tried, only two of them just "worked", tint2 and docky. You can't do anything fancy with them, but at least they didn't crash and bug. I couldn't find a good GUI file manager, Thunar was doable but that's it. And so on. The more complex and actively developed your software is the more likely it is to break when you try to run 'bleeding-edge'. It wouldn't be unreasonable to try a slower distribution. >Can you really have high customizability AND point-and-click ease of use? There is a hard limit on how much customisability you can usefully have in a menu system. >Maybe GUI emacs is up there, but point n click isn't even required for a text editor/IDE. In Emacs you can customise any variable in the system using a menu system but this menu system is so massive that it would be absurd to do anything other than search it for what you're looking for (best done by using the help hotkey, scrolling for what you're looking for, and then selecting customise). Even this fails to take advantage of the full system though because you can't use functions in this way, so you can't do things like add-hooks or define your own commands. Also Emacs is a little more than a 'editor/IDE' you can do just about anything in it. >It's been a long time since I've felt the lurking ghost of distrohopping, but now it's not towards an even nerdier distro. Based on what you've said if you do end up taking a leap I'd encourage you to check out slackware. It's a extremely stable (the system is monolithic with every package being well tested before a new release), and customiseable system (can be as minimal as arch if you'd like) but most of the system configuration can be done through a simple ncurses based menu system.

>>15839 >I'd encourage you to check out slackware Thank you for the recommendation, I considered it but in the end I decided to go for Antergos + XFCE. A fairly normal person UX in an open source OS can be pretty close to a sweet spot between ease of use and customizability, plus this distro is still rolling release, which won't generally break badly as long as you don't install months worth of system updates at once, and it still has access to the AUR. Running my bash scripts from a desktop shortcut with a fancy icon doesn't hurt, it also hurts less in terms of SRI. And the GUI package manager (pacmac) is so friendly. I've yet to find a GUI youtube client that lets you download lots of videos and keep track of channels without having an account, I'm still using a hand-written youtube-dl script which is like kicking dead whales down the beach. But that's it, qutebrowser rocks, lollypop and cantata are the best GUI music players I found, qbittorrent has a great tracker metasearch engine that can be expanded with plugins (for which I couldn't find a CLI equivalent), and mousepad is the right text editor for simple stuff that doesn't involve h4kin the matrix. For terminal stuff I have tilda, still configured with my l337 tmux all-keyboard soykaf, for when my hands actually are on the keyboard, and have to be because I'm actually typing. I've yet to choose a text editor for programming, I might try out atom or some lighter ones which may or may not make me switch from (spac)emacs. And what's fuarrrking mind-blowing is that my usage of this computer is now more efficient. Click this click that and that's it. There's a weird thing I saw, why do all GUI podcast clients neglect to let you choose the download folder? Gpodder, Vocal, the one called Podcasts, what the hell. You have to manually set env variables to change the default download dir. Still, I'm not going back to gpo.

qutebrowser is almost perfect, but it lacks a working adbock, which makes it useless for me

>>15877 What about using it in conjunction with a pihole?

>>15878 It has already an integrated host based adblock, but that does not really do the job. You will have constantly have annoying ads pop up and it does not work on youtube