FOSSPicks

Kitty

Twenty issues ago, we looked at an OpenGL-accelerated terminal emulator called Alacritty. Kitty is another such terminal emulator. You might think that the humble terminal couldn't gain much from this kind of acceleration, but it actually makes a huge difference. Just as keyboard latency affects the efficiency of proficient keyboardists, so too does terminal latency affect the productivity of command-line masters. Accelerating via OpenGL offloads rendering duties to your graphics hardware, modest or otherwise, promising both to lower system load and show screen updates much more smoothly. This threaded rendering also promises to reduce input latency. Subjectively, it succeeds and feels a lot quicker to use than other terminals. If you spend all day on the terminal, you're likely to feel the difference instinctively when using a fast terminal. Everything will seem more responsive, and you should have more CPU cycles for your work, too.

But Kitty also has many more features than OpenGL acceleration. It uses its own set of shortcuts. While these can be changed to match the ones you're already using, they will take some learning. Ctrl+Shift+T opens a new tab, for instance, which is nicely rendered as ASCII art at the bottom of the terminal. Also, the great "layouts" feature effectively merges into the terminal some of the best reasons for using screen or tmux. You can split the view into different panes, use a grid layout, or stack them on top of each other. The terminal can be scripted with its own commands, and images can be embedded within the terminal. You can configure Kitty remotely, and it runs on both X Window and Wayland, making it ideal if you're looking for a terminal to bridge this difficult transition.

Project Website

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

Kitty also runs on macOS, which makes it a great option if you want to use the same terminal on two different operating systems.

Markdown IDE

MindForger

In a world of pervasive data, trying to organize your thoughts, your plans, or even your notes can be a huge challenge. There are just so many places to start. The fact that you have access to many helpful tools almost adds to the problem, as putting time aside to test them just adds another job to your infinite to-do list. If this sounds familiar, you may want to forgo the reviews and just install MindForger instead, because it's brilliant.

MindForger describes itself as a "thinking notebook" and "Markdown IDE." It has lofty ambitions, including aiming to "mimic the learning processes of the human mind," but it's essentially a GUI fronting a repository of Markdown-written notes. Different views present the notes in different ways, from a hierarchical overview to an "Eisenhower matrix" view, which helps you prioritize tasks by splitting the view into quarters, with "Do soon" and "Do sometime" on the left and "Do first" and "Plan dedicated time" on the right.

Selecting New note from the Note menu brings up a requester that lets you specify details, such as the name for the note, a progress percentage, and a document type. Set types even generate common documents from templates (called stencils). Each set of documents is called a "notebook"; the project's own user documentation is contained within one such notebook, and the developer documentation is in another. The link hierarchy within the Markdown files is used to create the outline, shown as an index on the left pane. In this mode, a preview of the rendered Markdown is shown on the right. Double-click on this to open the editor, which can be augmented with both Emacs and Vim keybindings, and start writing.

Project Website

https://www.mindforger.com

MindForger is hugely comprehensive and looks lovely, letting you set tags, percentages and, templates for your notes and documents.

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