boxxy

Linux has become so good at containers, virtual machines, and isolated package formats that you're probably running more instances of Linux in containers than you are natively. But you often don't need a full-blown container just to keep a few things separated from your day-to-day system. For those occasions, boxxy is the perfect solution. Boxxy is a clever, low-resource tool that corrals directories and files into a location you specify, and optionally, only under the circumstances you write into its configuration file. Thanks to a Linux kernel feature called namespaces, boxxy accomplishes all of this without using symbolic links (symlinks), which are typically used all the time for ad hoc links between locations. But symlinks can make it difficult to understand where your files are, whether something has truly been backed up, and just how many chained links are sitting on top of one another. Boxxy is better.

Boxxy compartmentalizes all of this using a separate namespace for each configuration you create. A configuration can be as simple as a source target (such as ~/.tmux.conf) and a destination rewrite (~/.config/tmux/tmux.conf) with a mode setting of file for simple file redirection, or directory, which is the default. A context can optionally be set so that a rule only applies to one location, so you can build a set of rules for different locations with the same configuration. With that out of the way, you need to launch or alias the command you want run with boxxy, followed by the configuration name. Each command will think it is accessing resources from whatever path their developers have hard-coded into their executable while you're secretly redirecting input and output to a location of your choice. It's a brilliant way to clean up wayward configuration files, or a home directory cluttered with dozens of files from utilities that have no regard for Marie Kondo's tidying up philisophy.

Project Website

https://github.com/queer/boxxy

Boxxy takes advantage of low-level kernel features to create an accessible and useful tool to isolate apps you want to run.

Terminal browser

Carbonyl

We've looked at several terminal-based web browsers over the years, and most can trace their origins back to when a terminal was a necessity rather than a choice, because desktops didn't exist. This meant their focus was on getting access to a website and allowing you to navigate without too much difficulty, rather than emulating a nonexistent desktop web browser. Those apps are still brilliant if you need to download a graphics driver in an emergency or search the web for instructions on resetting a broken Wayland session. But for accessing the modern JavaScript-ridden interactive web, they're less than ideal. Carbonyl, however, is a terminal web browser that takes the terminal experience to a whole new level. Its output is a mixture of desktop FFmpeg-to-ASCII conversion (our guess) with perfect text rendering for the parts of a web page you need to read. And it's amazing.

Installation is easy via npm, and there's a Docker image, too, for simple cloud deployments. The compatibility and rendering come from a hidden Chromium-based renderer, but the results are remarkable. Video previews play perfectly, drop-down text is rendered natively, and websites are almost as easy to navigate as they are on the desktop, especially if you're already familiar with them. Everything just works, from SSL-dependent email to interactive 3D through WebGL. It even runs through SSH at 60 frames per second and takes very few resources when sitting idle. Video and WebGL do challenge your CPU, however, and there are too few keyboard bindings to remove the need for a mouse, which seems incongruent with the command line. It's also missing an advert blocker. But these are all small issues in something that seems to single-handedly solve a decades-old problem and even make command-line web browsing preferable to the desktop for coolness and readability factors.

Project Website

https://github.com/fathyb/carbonyl

Carbonyl renders web pages so brilliantly into your terminal it looks more like a low-resolution screen grab than pixel art.