User:Maffblaster/Recommended applications

Hey! You may or may not be interested in learning what applications I recommend in order to have a pleasant Gentoo experience, but something bought you to this page...nonetheless, I hope you find this helpful.

If you think there is either a better tool or an easier way to do the job the tool is supposed to do (see my feedback on each tool) feel free leave a comment on the talk page or message me in. I love learning about new tools and smarter workflows!

World file
When everything is done the world file will look something like this:

The quick and dirty way of rebuilding the system with all these packages is to updated the @world set after copy/pasting the the above text into the system's world file:

System management
My favorite GENTOO_MIRRORS value for :

My favorite value for sync-uri :

Gentoo specific

 * Build that btrfs, Plymouth-bootsplashed initramfs! -

Hardware

 * Contains utility. Use PCI devices? -
 * Contains utility. Use USB devices? -

Resource monitoring

 * htop -
 * atop -
 * iotop -
 * pipe viewer -

Misc

 * is a system uptime logger. It is really only necessary for OpenRC (since these kinds of times are not specifically logged by default), but it will work on systemd as well -

Task management

 * A command-line todo list manager. Keep this open in a buffer. -
 * The server part of the command-line todo list manager (above). -

Version control

 * Are there any other VCSs that matter? -
 * Graphically visualize where you need those changes. -
 * Command-line diff tool -

File management

 * My favorite file manger of late -
 * Don't forget the archive plugin -
 * Measure directory sizes in a way better than using simple -

Editors

 * Python development -
 * Everything else graphical -
 * There's an EditorConfig plugin available:
 * Everything else command-line -
 * Be sure to get the syntax highlighting packages for vim -
 * Support for EditorConfig files in vim (note this plugin requires vim to be built with the  USE flag enabled in order to function correctly) -
 * Run to install after emerging.
 * Verify plugin is installed...

Embedded work

 * Control host and/or user access to a running X server -
 * Want to simply and speed up mounting virtual filesystems for all your chroots? Yes, please. -
 * Want an old archive format that initramfs still use? Grab . -
 * Save time on recompiling toolchains and the like -
 * Build stage tarballs -

Portage development

 * View messages that we're printed once upon a time -
 * , an extremely fast package search tool -
 * q applets (fastest Portage database search ever!) -
 * Sign those ebuilds! -
 * Get the overlays -

Troubleshooting

 * Design how you want it to work, or at least how you think it should work, then build it -

Ideal setup

 * btrfs: the best filesystem created (so far). Enable it kernel side too and use it for everything (except your EFI partition!) -
 * Preserve your eyeballs -

Utilities

 * zip archives -
 * unzip -
 * rar archives -
 * lrz archives -
 * Find files with extreme speed -
 * Securely mount filesystems across the net -
 * Download large files in a bandwidth sensitive way -
 * What's on your network (graphical version)? -
 * What's on your network (cmdline version)? -

Communication

 * Primary browser -
 * Secondary browser -
 * Command-line browser -
 * IRC (you only need one good one!) -
 * VOIP client -
 * Mail client -
 * Encoding tools -

Entertainment
The best video player ever created -