Bookworm

Despite the digital revolution supposedly revolutionizing print and the initial huge success of e-readers like Amazon's Kindle, there hasn't been a huge blossoming in desktop or computer-based readers. There are a handful of minimal text readers, and of course there's Calibre. However, the latter is more like an unwieldy electronic book development environment than a reader for quiet contemplation. There's nothing like the range of applications you find for music playback, for instance, and you're often better off browsing a book's HTML directly on Project Gutenberg's website. But this doesn't help if you like to actually purchase your books, and this is where Bookworm can help. Bookworm feels a lot like an old iTunes version, only geared to books rather than music, and without an online store.

Just like a music player, you can ask Bookworm to import your collection by scanning a directory or by importing each file manually. The directory scanning can be found in the Preferences pane, but you'll need to restart the application before Bookworm will attempt to update your library. At least you can add more than one folder if you have books in multiple locations. You can also enable dark mode from the preferences pane, as well as two-page reading; these preferences are useful if you're reading at night or on a wide screen. Another great feature is the ability to create different reading profiles by setting different colors for background, text, and highlights. You can then easily switch between profiles. The library view uses either a thumbnail or a list, with the thumbnail images showing the cover and a small progress bar when you mouse over the image. However, reading is where you'll spend the most time, and the exceptional clarity and font rendering is coupled with bookmarks, search, annotations, and word definition, all available with a click of the i icon.

Project Website

https://babluboy.github.io/bookworm/

Manage and view your ebook collection saved in EPUB, PDF, CBR, and MOBI formats.

Password widget

Plasma Pass

There are many tools for managing your passwords. As a general rule, the simplest are often the most effective, because they're the ones you're most likely to use and trust. But simplicity doesn't always equal security, especially when it comes to online services that push and pull passwords back and forth to your browser. This is why we're big fans of pass, the simple command-line tool that effectively GPG encrypts your passwords into your regular filesystem, making them easily accessible from ordinary Unix tools. There are even tools that will automatically fill fields in your browser. We're big fans of QtPass GUI too, albeit with the caveat that one release broke its random password generator.

If you use the KDE desktop, there's now an even more convenient GUI, Plasma Pass. It's a Plasma widget that takes up very little space and is always available. As it's early days for development, installation is currently a little problematic. We needed to manually build and install from the source code. Hopefully, by the time you read this, you'll be able to download the widget directly from KDE's Get New Widgets requester or via a package for Neon. With the package installed and added to your desktop or panel, Plasma Pass couldn't be easier to use. It mimics the filesystem layout of your passwords, and you just need to click through this to select the entry you wish to decode to the clipboard. You never see the password itself, unless you paste it into a text field; your system's password manager can be used to decrypt the key. The widget will show a countdown for the password's lifespan on the clipboard before it takes care of removing it for you. It's basic, but exactly what you need.

Project Website

https://cgit.kde.org/plasma-pass

Add quick and easy pass integration with the KDE desktop, thanks to Plasma Pass.