Cool fancy programs?
Hello,
I'm looking for as many cool, even if pointless, programs as I can, be them terminal programs or gui ones. What do I mean by this? I'll use some examples:
- The Cube (I believe it was called Compiz): the one we all know and love.
- cmatrix
- the hollywood one
- That one whose name I forget but basically spawns a cat that chases your cursor, I saw it showcased on Pop!_OS' mastodon.
- wobbly windows
- Burn my window
- tplay
if any of you know any other fancy program like this let me know please. I want to showcase them to non-linux people to show them what can be done here but not necessarily in other OSes (particularly Windows).
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fsv or tdfsb
These are 3D filesystem browser apps that let you navigate your filesystem as though files and folders were trees in a forest that you're walking/flying through.
They were practically useless aside from the wow factor. I believe one may have made it into a movie scene. Jurassic Park?
It's a UNIX system. I know this!
There was something like this in 2d, what was it's name again?
Gotta go with sl
https://github.com/mtoyoda/sl
https://github.com/rwos/gti
in the same vein
alias ls=sl
Plus
alias alias='echo "" #'
sl -alFc | lolcat -itas 819
rainbow snake train
cool-retro-term: A good looking terminal emulator which mimics the old cathode display...
Linuxwave - https://github.com/orhun/linuxwave - You can generate music from your OS.
Holy shit this is me(n)tal
May I interest you in lolcat?
There's also dotacat written in Rust for people who find lolcat too slow.
Because dota is better than lol. Lol.
When talking about cool programs, you can't forget the classic cowsay
ponysay :)
I'm partial to Pokemon say.
and fortune or fortune-mod. Combine it with cowsay for best effect.
xjack is one of my all-time favorite programs.
Unsettling. A+
Real Jacks type it while making eye contact.
eDEX-UI - its basically a terminal, but as shown in movies. Mostly inspired by TRON I believe.
You have telnet. You can watch the complete episode 4 of Star Wars in Ascii on your terminal (and other ASCII movies)
This works on any OS though.
Fly-Pie is a good one! Also the same person makes modern versions of Burn My Windows, Desktop Cube and other such things.
that guy Schneegans makes the most beautiful useless rice! i'm tempted to switch to gnome now..
Several of them are on the KDE store now too!
No more secrets sounds like it fits the bill
+1 for asciiquarium
kdeconnect
You mean Neko. Used to have it installed a long time ago. I don't know if it still works in this day of compositors and Wayland.
I also remember having a bunch of penguins running around my screen like little lemmings. Xpenguins I think it was called.
You can also get Xcowsay to pop up occasionally on your desktop to offer silly advice, just pipe it from fortune and add it to crontab.
The Linux program that had a cat chase your mouse was Neko.
Is oneko the modern-ish version? As this sounds adorable.
I do believe it is!
Yeah, neko is a programming language.
It is now. The widdle puddy tat dates to 1989.
Also AMOR (Amazing Misuse Of Resources) which has more characters and features
All of xscreensaver
Cool retro terminal
It's a website rather than an app, but if you open it fullscreen, it's just as much fun: https://hackertyper.com
Lolcat, yt-dlp, hyprland. Honesty though most of what I find cool these days wouldn't make any sense to a Windows user. Like DWM, ST, XBPS, lf, ly, neovim, etc.
https://github.com/dustinkirkland/hollywood
https://gitlab.com/jallbrit/cbonsai
Procrastinate away 😁
Cowsay, figlet, telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl, misfortune, cava, xscreensaver are a few that come to mind.
cowsay
https://gitlab.com/christosangel/ascii-matrix
https://gitlab.com/christosangel/c-pipes
dd
Or xantfarm for the other times of the year !
xscreensaver with IFS. Can't stop looking at it. I'm writing this on another computer because I don't want to disable screen saver on my primary one.
What's the IFS part? I tried a quick web search but didn't find anything...
https://www.xoft.cz/prog/ifs_screensaver.html
It's included here: https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/xscreensaver-data-extra
Thank you!
I have this already :) now I know their name!
Institute of Fiscal Studies. But it's now called LIBF - London Institute of Banking and Finance.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18953697
Live Captions.
could you link any examples?
https://flathub.org/apps/net.sapples.LiveCaptions
As a German speaker myself it is very much useless but if you speak French, English or polish it is very useful
Unfortunately I didn't found a way to train a model on German
Check out eaglemode
Not a Linux app but I'm willing to bet that you'd love https://windows93.net.
Wayfire - basically Wayland Compiz
Unimatrix - CMatrix-like program
cellular-automaton.nvim - neovim plugin, check out the video in the github page, i don't know how to explain it but it's cool
The cat one is probably oneko. Most of the special effects crap you'd find in your compositor settings.
Maybe not pointless, but it doesn't really bring much to the table.
https://github.com/gentoo-btw/ramfetch
Error 404 :c
Oh... I guess he deleted the repo, I had the project bookmarked.
I think I still have it on a rig installed somewhere if you're interested, it's just a shell script, like neofetch.
it would definitely be interesting, preserving these things is good.
Cool, I'll share it ☺️. Don't know if it's the latest version though 😂.
Tried on archive.org, it doesn't have a copy of that repo 😔.
asciiquarium
No love for xroach? Man, I'm old. Is it still around?
Ema
cs
What are these?
Pretty sure they meant to type "Emacs"
Oh, wouldn't have known: I use Vim, btw
fyi i use neovim