this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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Linux

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Why software do you use in your day-to-day computing which might not be well-known?

For me, there are ~~two~~ three things for personal information management:

  • for shopping receipts, notes and such, I write them down using vim on a small Gemini PDA with a keyboard. I transfer them via scp to a Raspberry Pi home server on from there to my main PC. Because it runs on Sailfish OS, it also runs calendar (via CalDav) and mail nicely - and without any FAANG server.

  • for things like manuals and stuff that is needed every few months ("what was just the number of our gas meter?" "what is the process to clean the dishwasher?") , I have a Gollum Wiki which I have running on my Laptop and the home Raspi server. This is a very simple web wiki which supports several markup languages (like Markdown, MediaWiki, reStructuredText, and Creole), and stores them via git. For me, it is perfect to organize personal information around the home.

  • for work, I use Zim wiki. It is very nice for collecting and organizing snippets of information.

  • oh, and I love Inkscape(a powerful vector drawing program), Xournal (a program you can write with a tablet on and annotate PDFs), and Shotwell (a simple photo manager). The great thing about Shotwell is that it supports nicely to filter your photos by quality - and doing that again and again with a critical eye makes you a better photographer.

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[–] z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Espanso Text Expander. Its not Linux specific but its got so many uses. You can even use it with bash scripts to have essentially alises/text shortcuts for short or massive amounts of text. I use it for so many code snippets and template texts in Neovim and other applications that involve typing.

[–] med@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I used eapanso for a few years, but kept running in to issues with it spawning hundreds of versions of itself.

I really miss it though. Would you say it has matured?

[–] z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I've used espanso for about 4, maybe 5 years and haven't encountered this issue. I even have to compile it myself because it's daemon mode uses systemd on Linux and I dont run a distro that uses systemd and had to modify the source code slightly. I do run it in managed mode, essentially invoking it from a startup script when my window manager starts up.

Long story short, what you encountered might have been related to how it integrates with the init system and you might try and run it directly from a startup script. Simple test is to just try and install the latest version and see if you have the same issue.

[–] med@sh.itjust.works 2 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Thanks for the feedback - It was a systemd issue. Something caused it to continue generating slices for espanso until the machine locked up - probably spawned with each terminal. It happened on out of date fedora install 36 (when 41 was out) with gnome on it.

Since then I've moved to a window manager for all my machines and would likely invoke it the same way - perhaps now it's time to revisit!

[–] fossilesque@mander.xyz 3 points 1 day ago

Yea this is great ty!