 Every month I put together a list of applications for Linux that I call the top five apps of the month and this month is no different. It's March now and we're very steadily chugging through the year which is just absolutely mind boggling the fact that it was just Christmas like yesterday but it seems like I start out all these videos saying how fast time goes because I just can't believe that it's time for another one of these videos but that's beside the point. This month I have five really cool apps to share with you so let's go ahead and jump in. So the first app on the list this month is called EXA now this is a very simple application but basically what it is is a replacement for the LS command in the terminal and well LS is very powerful and it does basically everything you'll need to do. What EXA does is it adds several options for customization that allow you to get better output for listing files in directories also adding things like get support and icon support and even more color support than what LS has and you can also dictate how the files are listed whether they're horizontal or vertical. There's just a ton of stuff here that you can do with EXA so much so that I haven't even really scratched the surface of it with what I use it for I've been using it now for years but the point of the application is it's simply to make LS even more powerful than it already is and it's a replacement for it and it's people are going to say it is faster because I believe it's actually written in Rust I'm not actually sure about that but I don't care about that kind of thing to me LS isn't slow so the speed of the application isn't really something that I noticed they're both really fast so that is EXA. There's not much more I can talk about simply because it just does what it's supposed to do it list out applications similar to what LS does but with a whole bunch more options. If you're going to use this I highly recommend getting into the man page because there's a ton of flags and stuff and that's how you customize EXA into something other than just a standard LS you use those flags in order to make things either look differently or had different output so that is EXA. Moving on to the next one the next one is called Coolero. Now what Coolero is in theory is an application that allows you to control your cooling devices inside of your computer now the one thing is for sure is that this is not going to work for everybody for me personally the only device that this was able to actually detect and allow me to actually configure is the RGB controller on my motherboard now I don't have any RGB devices in my computer at all so as you can tell I'm not obviously a gamer so that's just a thing but if you have like an AIO or something like that or a certain AIO as I should say certain fan controllers and stuff like that coolero will allow you to set fan curves set RGB and stuff like that for those certain devices now like I said it does not work with everything so I have an AIO in my computer but it doesn't actually detect it I don't know if that's simply because it's not plugged into the a certain fan header that it can detect or whatever I don't know what the why it doesn't maybe just not compatible but the point is is for me personally the only thing that it detected was the RGB fusion thing on my motherboard other than that it does just a good job of actually showing you with the CPU temperature is so that's something that you if even if it doesn't detect any of your other hardware being able to just see your CPU temperature is fairly interesting in a graph now like I said with the b-roll you're seeing you're only seeing what it's able to detect on my system so what I would do if I were you is download this and give it permission to search through your hardware and it might be able to detect something that it's more compatible with on your system than it would be on mine so a cool arrow is kind of cool because I know a lot of people have hardware in their computers that has software that's available to to that hardware on windows things that all you control RGB and fan curves and all this stuff that kind of stuff is not usually available on Linux cool arrow will potentially give you an option to tweak some of the settings for that hardware if you can find hardware that is compatible with clear or have if you have hardware that is compatible with cool arrow so that is cool arrow okay so the next one on the list isn't so much an application as it is a GNOME extension so if you're using GNOME or you're using Ubuntu or some other desktop environment that uses GNOME this is a tool that might help you now if you use snaps outside of a GNOME desktop environment and sadly this is not going to be something that you're able to use but what this app does is call snap manager and what snap manager does is it allows you to as it says on the 10 manage your snaps now most of the stuff is just links to commands that are in the terminal so anything that snap manager does you can obviously do through terminal commands but if you don't want to do if you don't want to remember the terminal commands you can get into the drop down menu do things like install snaps remove snaps update the snap lists disconnect snaps and just a ton more stuff that gives you fine tune control over the snaps that are on your system now i'm not a big snaps guy as anybody knows so i don't know a ton about what the technological details are behind so what some of the stuff does so if you are more into snaps chances are you'll be more knowledgeable about what some of the stuff towards the bottom of the drop down list actually does but for even just the casual snap user being able to use this drop down menu to install remove and see the snaps that are on your list without having to remember the snap commands in the terminal might be possibly useful now ironically i used a flat pack in order to install this so what are you going to do so that is snap manager like i said it's great if you're in ubuntu or in a gnom based distro uh that is uh using snaps outside of that this would not be useful because you can't use it outside of gnomes so that's a that's a little bit of a downside i wish that they just made this an application instead of a of a gnom extension because if this was just an application like a gtk application you could use it on any distro any desktop environment that uses snaps and it would have been way more useful so that is snap manager okay so the next one is hard to talk about simply because i don't know a ton about it i've only played around with it for maybe 15 minutes or so and i've done some reading on it but the app we're talking about this time is called twine now twine is as far as i can tell a visual story creator so simply something like choose your own adventure applications that will allow you to create stories that are choose your own adventure style stories inside of an application now it's very very complicated from the like the 15 minutes that i spent around with it and some of the stuff you see me that be really you can tell i just have no clue what i'm doing so just take that as you will but the point is is that if you are interested in writing stories and you want to do something like choose your own adventure this could possibly be a tool that you can look into to write your story now like i said it is seemingly very complicated but i didn't dive into the documentation at all and in fact i don't know what the documentation even looks like so i'm just gonna hope that there's actually really good documentation to go along with this because it does look fairly complicated and i would hope that there's documentation to actually you know show you how to do stuff and i assume that there is because this has been around for a long time now for me personally like i said i hadn't spent a lot of time with this but this is the application this month that i'm looking forward to playing around with the most simply because i enjoy creating stories and stuff like it's something that i really enjoyed doing when i was younger so being able to look and do something like this now might bring back some of those memories i also like reading choose your own adventure stories so if i could create my own that'd be really cool i did see that it has macro support there's also variable support so if you wanted to set certain variables throughout your story and then reuse them over and over again you can do that there's also things like being able to link between different passages which is obviously essential i did not notice like a drag and drop linkage capability so that's what you'll see in the b-roll possibly me trying to link the two past passages that i created together just by dragging and dropping them if that functionality is there it wasn't intuitive at least in the small amount of time that i played around with it but other than that that's twine it's one of those things that's probably not for everybody because not everybody's going to want to create their own choose your own adventure story but for those of you who do this is definitely something to look at okay so the last app on the list this month is called anki a n k i i'm not sure if i'm pronouncing that right but basically what anki or anki does is it's a flashcard creation tool and that means it's probably not for everyone right but if you're in school or you're studying or you're trying to learn a new language or something like that you could use anki to create flashcards to help you learn whatever it is you're trying to learn it does a really good job of allowing you to create a whole deck of cards several decks of cards to learn whatever is you're learning i i did some spanish stuff now don't laugh at my spanish that i type in here i'm not sure if i got any of that stuff right i'm pretty sure i got hello right beyond that not sure my spanish is very rusty like i i haven't studied or used spanish since i got out of university and that's been 12 years ago now so it's been a long time my my spanish is rusty but the point is is that if you're trying to learn something like this or if you're still in school and you want a flashcard program for linux anki is a good choice now it also allows you to keep track of statistics it allows you to tell it how good you did in terms of remembering what was on the card if you did well or bad and then it will reshuffle the cards and allow you to go you obviously start over again but also will keep track of how well you've done now it uses this due date system i'm not actually familiar with how or why that exists it seems seemed a little bit superfluous for me but that impression was mostly because i didn't look into it too much so there is underlying complexity to this app if you want to dive into some of the more advanced features of how to manage your decks and so on and so forth so that is anki honestly i kind of wished that i had known about this before like when i was in university that would have been really cool because i actually had to create paper flashcards like a caveman so if you are interested in creating flashcards or maybe perhaps you have children who are you know in school this could be an option for helping them study so that is anki and that is the end of the list for this month so if you have an application that you'd like to see on this list in the future you can leave those applications in the comment section below i know several people have left comments on the last two videos for applications i promise i haven't forgotten about those yet so those will appear on featured lists as well so if you're interested in having your application featured on this list leave those in the comment section below just don't leave links because youtube will delete those things i won't ever see them you can follow me on twitter at the linuxcast you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast before i go i'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons robert said devon patrick fred kramer maglund jackson nevin tools debay separate linux gear samuel michael art center carbon dated jeremy shunt odin martini andy bros merit camp joshley j dog peter a crucible dark vandex and primus thanks everybody for watching i'll see you next time