Ubuntu Musings

My preferred tool for managing tasks is a text file. Not just any text file, but todo.txt. OK, it’s more than a text tile. It’s also a powerful shell script that does the heavy lifting for you. What I like about todo.txt is that it’s simple and, because it’s plain text, it’s portable.

That said, there’s one aspect of todo.txt that puts some people off: it’s a command line tool. Yes, it’s true. There are Linux users who aren’t huge fans of the command line. Sure, there’s a solid graphical interface to todo.txt for Android devices. But what if someone wants to get the full todo.txt experience on your desktop without cracking open a terminal window?

They can turn to DoStuff. DoStuff is a plain, but nicely effective, graphical face for todo.txt.

Let’s take a look at it.

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• An introduction to embedded Linux
• Play music at the command line with CMUS
• How to migrate Linux between computers
• A beginner’s guide to vim
• A look at some powerful command line tools for developers
• 75 Open Source tools for protecting your privacy

I do a majority of my writing (and that includes all of my blogging) in Markdown. What’s Markdown? It’s what’s called a lightweight markup language and it allows me to write and format what I’m writing using keyboard symbols. You can learn more about Markdown here.

There are a number of reasons I use Markdown, but essentially it has to do with my love of working in plain text and the need for flow.

Over the years, I’ve used a number of online, desktop, and mobile editors to work with Markdown. Many of them had features that I liked but none really had everything I was looking for.

That was until I ran into UberWriter. For me, it’s almost the perfect Markdown editor. Read on to find out why.

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So much music, so many desktop music players, and so little time.

I’m sure that most Linux users can rattle off the names of a few music players. We’ve all tried a few (sometimes more than a few), in the hopes of finding the right one. I know I have. The closest I came to finding that music player was one called Songbird. Until it stopped working and the developers stopped showing the Linux version any love.

While I still haven’t found that music player that’s perfect for me, one that I stumbled across a while ago has made an impression. It’s called Clementine and while it’s simple, it does quite a good job.

Let’s take a look at it.

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No matter what your reasons are for keeping a journal or a diary, there are any number of ways in which to keep that journal. You could go old school and use a paper notebook. You could use a web-based applications. Or you could take advantage of the humble text file.

Another option is to use a dedicated journaling application. There are several very flexible and very useful journaling tools for the Linux desktop.

Let’s take a look at three of them.

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A few months ago, I wrote a post in this space about NixNote, a desktop Evernote client for the Linux desktop (and other desktops, too). While I like NixNote, its major problem is that it’s written in Java. Which makes it big and bulky and slow. While I’ve never found it unusable and while I liked it, NixNote wasn’t quite the solution I was looking for.

Shortly after publishing that post about NixNote, I stumbled across another Evernote client for the Linux desktop. Called Everpad, it’s lighter than NixNote and has better integration with the desktop.

Let’s take a peek at it.

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