 Every once in a while you'll come across a tool that just changes the way you use Linux Or it alters your workflow in such a way that it just makes it better And there are several tools that have done that for me So what I thought I'd do today is take you through five tools that have just changed the way I use Linux Or at least have made it significantly easier to do certain things So the first two on the list are very much related so I'm going to cover them together The first one is called cronny Now what cronny is is a cron job task daemon I don't think they actually call it a daemon but whatever The idea is it runs in the background and handles your cron jobs And if you don't know what a cron job is basically is a task that can be set for a certain interval That will always run in the background at that interval So say for example you had a weather script that you wanted to run every hour on the hour And then you could then display that in say a bar or something You could do that Or if you wanted to back up your home partition to an external hard drive Every night at midnight you could do that through a cron job And that's what cronny does Cronny actually is the service that runs in the background to run your cron jobs Now there are several different types of these things Cronny just happens to be the one that I use And it's really good It's very reliable, very stable, I've never had any problems with it So cronny is the tool that you would use to run those tasks Now it is available in I believe every single repo out there that you can possibly imagine It's been around for a long time So you should be able to install it through your distros package manager And then if you're using systemd You would just enable it using systemctl cronny.service to enable that And then start it, you just have to reboot your computer or enable now If you know how to do that If you don't know how to do it, there are several tutorials out there on how to use cronny So you should definitely look those up if you need help But let's say you got that all set up And you want to go through and create some cron jobs The hardest part about cron jobs is that your cron job file or your cron tab Is going to probably look like this And this is mine And the at daily, at weekly things are self-explanatory Those are things that will run daily or weekly But the ones here in between, these ones with the stars Are really weird, right? And my biggest problem with cron Is that you have to come up with a syntax And you have to remember everything How the positions in the syntax go together And I can never do it I'm not good at it at all And I just, I can't do it It's beyond my memory in order to remember how this stuff works So in order to fix that There is a tool which brings us to our second tool Called cron tab guru And basically what this does is it gives you that initial syntax If we go back here, we'll see this weird syntax here Basically what this means is that at every 10th minute Run this task Or at every 10th minute run this command And then put it in this folder Or file That's what that means But there are several different things you can do So we just hit the random button here Like this one here At the 5th minute in August do whatever you're going to do Or in this case At 14.15 on the day of the month 1 So this would be the January And you can see how this can get really complicated really fast So at 22 on every day of the week From Monday through Friday Now one thing I will say about cron tab guru Is that it doesn't do a very good job Of making the examples here user readable So every day of the week Instead of every day of the week You know But you can kind of get the idea And the best part about it Is that you can go through and play around With what these things mean So if we just start out with 0 And then do this So this means at every minute So then you can just go through And play with the numbers So this would be every minute On the 6th day of the month And then you can do different combinations So this would be the 1 So this would be at minute 1 On the 6th day of the month So say you wanted to go through and do something On the 6th day of the month And go through and change just to 5 And that would be 5 And then this would be the month And this would be 12 We could do 1 through 12 So if you wanted to do something The idea is you go through and play with it And not only do you Learn more about what this stuff means But also if you want to Just go through and have it done for you You can There are several examples here If you wanted to do something Like every Sunday That's what that would look like Or if you wanted to do once a week That's what that would look like If you wanted to do every month That's what that would look like And so on and so forth So if you click on the examples link down here at the bottom There's a ton of different examples that you can use So every 4 minutes would look like this Every hour Would look like this So that way If you're like me and you can't remember What Cron looks like Just comes here It'll do it for you The next one on the list is A favorite of mine And that is Rofi Rofi is fantastic Now everybody knows I think Probably what Rofi is But Rofi is a de-menu replacement A de-menu alternative It's a menu system that allows you To go through and launch applications And do so much more So this is my application launcher Chromium like this Or virtual blocks like that And you just type in the thing that you want to launch And it would launch it Now it does other things as well So if I open that back up And hit control tab It will allow me to go through and do SSH into certain places If I had a whole bunch of SSHs It will allow me to run regular Run prompts and stuff like that This will allow me to go through and do scripts And it also will show you all of my So it does that as well Now just that alone pretty cool But also there's a ton of stuff that has been Extended into Rofi To do awesome things so for example This is Rofi emoji And it will allow me to go through And select all the emojis that I want So let's just say person So there's babies, childs, boys and stuff like that So that's emojis Another one is you can go through And write scripts so for example I have a commandeered Distort tube search script So I can do this and that will allow me to Search Google like this And then search for the Linux Cast and then it would Actually go through and open up in my Browser if I had that script set up To open up in the right browser But you get the idea so you can write A whole bunch of different scripts so I have one for my bookmarks So I can go through and open up say YouTube And it would open up YouTube in the browser You get the idea so that is Rofi There's just a ton of stuff that you can do with it Including the next one So the next one is also A Rofi slash D menu Thing and I wanted to do it separately because it is so cool So there are a ton of different clipboard Managers out there some of them GUI Some of them are built into your browser Or whatever my favorite Is called clip menu D Now clip menu D will go through And save all the Stuff in your clipboard as you go So it will allow you to go through and do a Have like a history of all of your Copied information so and then You can assign that to Rofi Or D menu and then you just hit a key binding And your history of your clipboard Comes up and you can go through and select Whatever hit enter and then Whatever you hit entered on would now Be the active thing in the clipboard I can't tell you how many times I need to go through and copy Stuff and then I lose it And then I normally have to go back and Re-copy that stuff but With clip menu D I go through Can go through and just go back into the history Reselect it and it's in the It's then in the right buffer and I can Paste it wherever I need to paste it Clip menu D is awesome now I will say this If you use a password manager And you copy your passwords into Your clipboard chances are Clip menu D is going to remember it So just be very careful that if Especially if you do something like stream That you don't accidentally show a password When you use clip menu D Because it does remember everything I'm not sure If there's a way to turn that Functionality off I think Some password managers will take The password out of memory After a while for whatever reason Bitwarden doesn't seem to do that Or maybe I just haven't figured that out yet So that is clip menu and it's really cool So the last one on the list Is one that just truly Helps me every single day And that is Pulse Mixer Now Pulse Mixer is a terminal Based application that allows you to go through And change volumes for sources Whether it's input or output For audio So if we go back to F1 here These are my output sources F2 input sources And so on and so forth and then you can navigate using them keys And change the Volume using the Also the them keys so if I go up and down With the them keys so H and L to go up and down Or in this case I guess it's really supposed to be left and right But for me up and down Whatever but the idea is You can change the volume of certain sources You can also go through if you enter And change defaults Now I'm not going to mess with anything right now because I'm recording But the idea is If you go through and need to change the default Source so for example You want to change between your headphones And your speakers You want to do that you can just go to Output and change From These right now on my headphones To the speakers which would be this one here And that's just as easy as hitting enter And hit set as default and you can change those back and forth Now the reason why I like it is because It's much simpler at least I feel Than something like PAVU control Which tends to be bogged down With just a ton of different stuff And it's kind of hard to understand This is very simple input output Change default sources And change volume, that's what it does And it's really good We all know that audio Sucks on Linux It just does I should say when it's not working It sucks, when it works fine It's great, when things Do funky things, it sucks A lot of times I have it After reboot I come back in And for whatever reason pulse audio Is my default input so it's changed it from The microphone Here to the webcam audio And everybody knows Webcam audio is terrible so Especially when you compare it to an actual microphone So I have to go into Pulse Mixer and change that and Pulse Mixer Just makes it so easy to do so And it's one of those tools That I just couldn't live without So those are the tools That I found that just kind of Changed the way I use Linux Particularly like for Chronic you guys Saw my Chron tab and a lot of the stuff That I use there is superfluous Most of that stuff was just Putting stuff in my bar, not a big deal But I have a really hard time Remembering to back up Like my home directory Like if it was up to me I'd never remember to do it Sometimes I would remember right before An update or ever but sometimes Or most of the time not So backing up is a big Problem for me so with the Chron Chrony and Chron tab and stuff I can go through and set that up So it backs up every night At midnight and it goes to my external hard drive And that way I just don't have to worry about it That's just one of those things that's really good Rofi I use that 300 times a day I open up that thing to open up every application I use it to switch between windows Especially everybody knows I use A ton of workspaces with that Window switcher I can go through and find When windows are open and where they're open And switch to them really easily And it's nice because something like DWM doesn't have A traditional task switcher You can cycle through windows and stuff like that But there's no traditional task switcher So using Rofi For that purpose is really cool Pulse Mixer I already explained Is just one of those things where It just makes pulse audio better Because it solves some of the funky things That pulse audio seems to do So those are my tools that are just You know kind of life changing So in the comment section below I'd love to hear If you have any tools that you've found Over the years that have just kind of Changed the way you use Linux You can also if you have Experienced with some of the tools that I mentioned today Leave those comments below as well You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast You can support me on patreon.patreon.com Before I go I'd like to take them home To thank my current patrons Thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next time