[Wylug-discuss] Favourite FOSS apps and tools?

[Smylers]

Last month Louisa Parry writes:

> So then - which FOSS applications/tools do you enjoy using and why?
> what's been your best find?

* poster -- great for making large printouts on A4 paper (scissors and
  Pritt Stick also required for assembling them).  You give it a
  single-page PostScript document/image/diagram/whatever and tell it how
  many sheets of paper you'd like it to span.  It then scales the
  document up or down appropriately, optimizing it to just fill the
  available sheets.  Each sheet gets printed with crop marks, (and the
  image bleads over where you need to cut (duplicating what's on the
  edge of the adjacent sheet), making it very easy to glue the joins
  seemlessly).

* units -- converts between all sorts of units that humans use for
  various things: distances, weights, times, temperatures, and so on.
  Easily convert metres per second into miles per hour, or '4 cups
  sugar' into a weight in grams.

* dict -- the simplest possible interface for looking up a word in a
  dictionary: you type "dict" then the word you want to look up, and it
  displays a dictionary entry (or several).  Much faster than reaching
  for a paper dictionary, or even using a web-based dictionary.  If what
  you give it isn't a word then it offers correctly spelt suggestions of
  what you might have meant.

* dc -- command-line calculator with reverse Polish input.  It has a
  minimalist interface, and requires reading the doc to find out how to
  use it, but there are only a few basic commands you need to learn, and
  then you can perform calculations with the minimum of keystrokes.
  Being reverse Polish it has a stack, so it's easy to store lots of
  intermediate results and construct complex calculations out of simpler
  ones.

Hmmm, I note all of the above are command-line based.  I wasn't
particularly aiming to mention command-line tools, and I do also use
lots of graphical applications, but somehow it just turned out that the
tools I find most useful at solving common 'real world' problems[*0] are
all command-line driven.

(Apologies for the delay in posting this; nothing immediately sprang to
mind -- which surprised me -- but the thread made me think about this
and the above are all things I've noticed me using since.)

  [*0]  By "'real world' problems" I mean things that needed doing
  anyway (making posters, doing calculations) and which a computer helps
  with, as distinct from problems to which a non-computer-user could
  reasonably point out "well if you weren't using a computer in the
  first place then you wouldn't need to do that anyway".

Smylers