 Hi, I'm Denshi, and before I begin this video on Linux tools, I'd just like to thank everyone who's ever submitted fanart. Now in the 3 plus years of this channel's existence, I've received quite the backlog of fanart, that's what you're seeing on the screen right now. And if you have any to submit, just send it over at alexadenshi.org, that's my personal email address, and I will showcase it in my future videos, both at the beginning and at the end. There will be more fanart to be shown at the end of this video, so if you want to see more of that, then I guess stick around. But besides that, sorry for delaying the video, and once again, thank you. Hi, I'm Denshi. Now if you're watching today's video on Linux tools, you might be able to relate to this one feeling. Let's say you're watching a tutorial online where somebody is doing a bunch of stuff on their computer, and suddenly, they pull up some really specific program, normally it's like a graphical interface, or maybe something on the terminal, and you have no idea what it is, what it's called, and what it does. Today's video is like a comprehensive rundown of every single one of those obscure Linux tools that you've probably come across watching videos of Linux online or looking at tutorials about Linux or just seeing people use Linux in public. So I'm going to rundown as many of those as possible, pretty much every single one that I've ever used or I've come across. This is like a grab bag of Linux stuff. It's like a bunch of random programs and terminal stuff, and it might not all make a cohesive sense, so it's all started to smash together into this one massive video. But as always, I hope you enjoy watching, and let's get right into it. So the first set of tools I'm going to talk about in today's video are limited to the system tray. So the system tray is that little section of the screen. You might have it at the top left, the top right, normally it's like at the bottom right of your screen, like how Windows has it. But basically the system tray can store little icons, like this little Wifi icon, and that's the first program we're going to talk about. This program is called NM Applet, or Network Manager Applet. As they implies, it helps you use the service Network Manager, which is what most Linux sisters come with pre-installed to manage your networks. Clicking it by default, as you can see, shows you your current connections, so ethernet connections or Wifi connections. If you click on available connections, just hovering over it, it will show you the available Wifi connections, and you can connect to a hidden Wifi network. You can also manage VPN connections on here. And if you right click the icon, you can go into edit connections, and you can go in edit preferences for each individual connection. Now that's not the only system tray utility I'm talking about today. There's also some to see stuff like your volume, status, or your battery. So there's one for battery called C-BAT icon, so I'm just going to open that one, C-BAT icon, just like that, and as you can see it pops over there. It even shows notifications. If you hover over C-BAT icon, it'll tell you the battery is charged. If I quickly unplug my laptop, as you can see it says that the battery is discharging, it's 99% remaining. So this little icon can help you see your battery status. And there's also another tool similar to this, but for volume called volume icon. So as you can see, the volume icon is literally just a volume icon. I'll show you the volume. If you click on it, it muses the system. If you click on it again, it unmutes the system. If you mute, as you can see, it's muted. It's unmuted. If you increase your volume, I'm increasing it. With my hotkeys, it'll show you your volume. So that's a useful little tool that you can use to check your volume status. This next set of tools is for taking screenshots of your system. So by default on my rice, I have a thing where I can click print screen and it opens up this little arrow selection crosshair thing that I can do. And then I can drag a section of my screen like this anti-window social club wallpaper, just a portion of it. And then when I stop clicking and open up my file manager, as you can see, there's now a screenshot of that portion of my screen in my file manager. Now, what I can do is I can use a program called Hacksaw and a program called Shotgun to accomplish this. And I'll show you how I do it. So let me just open up my terminal over here. If you run the program Shotgun by default, it just takes a screenshot of your entire screen. There you go. There's a screenshot of my screen. Now, Shotgun has an option called dash G. Now, with the dash G option, let me just zoom this in over here. With the dash G option, it accepts geometry as an option to take a screenshot of only a specific part of the screen. And we can use a program called Hacksaw. That's the program which gives me the crosshair over here. Now, it's gray by default, but you get the idea. Normally it's white and I can drag a section of the screen and all Hacksaw will do it won't take a screenshot, but it will output that text of the dimensions of where I'm selecting with it. Now, what I can do is I can use Shotgun's dash G option but replace the contents of dash G with this little substitution thing. So dollar sign and brackets, that's substitution and shell script. And in there, I'm going to write Hacksaw. Now, it's going to run Hacksaw first to get the dimensions of what I'm selecting. So I'm going to select like a portion of my screen over here. And then it will spit that out as a screenshot. So I'll get up the screenshot over here. As you can see, it's that portion of my screen. So if I want to take a screenshot using the system again, running that command of, I don't know, my prompt to the screenshot of my prompt. And then I open this up and there you go. There's my prompt. So this set of tools, Shotgun and Hacksaw is fantastic for taking screenshots of your screen. You can customize the output of Shotgun. You can look through its options, type Shotgun dash H to see the different things that you can do. But generally, it's a fantastic tool. I really recommend trying to use it. It's very minimal, it's very fast, lean, efficient. And so is Hacksaw. Hacksaw is a fantastic tool that you can pair with Shotgun to get a cool little minimal screenshot utility. This next program has more security applications. It's called S-Lock or suckless lock, or if you're minimal, just call it S-Lock. You can run S-Lock from your prompt or your terminal, what have you. And once you run it, it'll just make your screen black, as you can see. However, here's the cool thing about S-Lock. If you type in your password and then press Enter, it brings you back to your screen. So let me just do that again. I open up S-Lock and it locks my screen. I type in my password while I'm typing it in. It goes blue and then I press Enter and it lets me into my screen. Now, here's another thing with S-Lock. If you type in the wrong password and then press Enter, it goes red. But if you type in the right password again, so I'm going to type in the right password now and then press Enter, it just brings you to your screen. So it's a fantastic minimal lock utility with no fancy, you know, animations or screensaver or something like that. It just locks it and makes it so people can't access your work while you're in a public space. Very useful and very secure. This next tool, I think, might take a little bit of imagination to understand because you can't really see my screen's brightness. But this is a program called Brightness CTL. Brightness CTL, if you run it by default, it will show you the devices on your system that have a brightness. And if you type in S, you can set your brightness. So set it to 100, for example, is going to set it to Valley 100. Set it to 100 percent is going to set it to its maximum. And you can also do a thing where you set it to like 10 minus percent, which decreases the light by 10 percent. So keep running this. It actually is darkening my screen, although you can't see it yourself. I can barely see my screen right now, but you guys can see it because it's on a recording. Let me set it back to 100 percent. Yeah, there we go. So Brightness CTL is a command line utility you can use to set the brightness of your screen. This next tool feels a little bit weird, but I think you might be able to find something that you need it for. It's called AtBSWP. It's a program you can use to capture input and play it back in Xorg and Wayland. So those are the display servers on Linux. So you can do stuff like click the record button. And let's say I want to open my terminal and then type in print def. Hello world or something like that. And then it prints a hello world and then I click stop recording. Now, what just happened there is I recorded a macro. So movements of my mouse and my keyboard that I can then play back by clicking this little play button. So I play that button. And as you can see, my mouse is moving on the screen. It opens a terminal. It does that thing where it drags a terminal, makes it smaller, drags it to the center over there. It types in that print def command. And as you can see, it prints out hello world, although I think I did it wrong. You can also save your captures to your disk and you can load captures. Like over here, I have a capture called my cool capture. I wonder what it does. Let's play it and find out. It doesn't work. Going back to the theme of basic system tools, you're probably wondering what those notifications you saw on my screen were all about previously. Those are powered by a program called Dunst. Now, Dunst runs automatically once you've installed it because it's called by debus. Debus is the desktop system bus, which calls all the important programs that you need for your desktop to work. So once you've installed it, it should just start automatically working for you. With Dunst, you can open up your terminal and just type notify dash send and type pretty much anything you want and it will send a notification of it. So first of all, I'm going to give this notification a title. I'm going to say my cool notification. And then at the end over here, I'm going to take it and then and then at the end of the year, I'm going to add another set of quotation marks and I'm going to add the description. I'm going to say this is a notification. You're seeing in Dunst. And now that I've typed and then once I send that through, as you can see, there's a notification with the title and bold and the regular text for the description. So that's what Dunst does. If you want to configure how those notifications look, you can go to .config, Dunst, Dunst RC and in here you can do things like change the width, the height of the notifications. You can give them a frame. You can offset them, set their padding, change the formatting. And you can even have notifications of different urgencies, which is pretty cool. So, yeah, that's a basic notification payment that I use called Dunst. This next tool is fantastic if you have a phone and you want to copy over the contents, more specifically, if it's an Android phone. So I've plugged in my Android phone right now and I've set it up to have USB file transfer with my computer. But if I open up my file manager, well, nothing pops up. So to have this pop up, I can either install a file system Damon. So that would be like GVFS, but that's bloated. So instead, I'm going to use something called Android file system. So there's two ways of doing this. First, I can just run AFTP dash MTP dash Mount. This will automatically mount the device with a directory in my home directory. So if I open this up, I'll go into internal shared storage and boom, I can see the contents of my phone, which are blurred for obvious reason. But I can also do a thing. Well, first of all, I'm going to unmount it by clicking that button and delete this directory. But I can also run a program called Android file transfer. And Android file transfer is a graphical interface that lets you do various things with your phone. Once again, the contents of my phone are blurred for obvious reasons. You can even upload albums if you want to upload music specifically, upload directories, show thumbnails if you want to show thumbnails. So I guess I'll go into, I don't know, maybe there's a meme somewhere in my downloads. Is there? Oh, here we are. Here's a hilarious meme. But in all seriousness, this is a fantastic little program. I always use it to transfer over files with Android. And I recommend that anybody with an Android phone on Linux gets this. It's a very minimal and fast, reliable way to copy over your files. This next tool is where we start wondering more into the world of utilities rather than system necessities. It's a program called if top and it allows us to see all of the incoming and outgoing traffic on our system. And, you know, that's internet traffic, by the way. So if we open up our terminal, the first thing we probably want to do is see what interface we're using for our internet. So in my case, I'm going to run IPA and that'll show me all the useful information. And as we can see, the interface I'm using for the internet is E and P zero S three one F six, very memorable name. Right. So what I want to do is I want to run pseudo if top dash I. So that's for interface and then the name of my interface right there. And then I need to put my password in. And as you can see, it pulls up this little interface that shows this traffic. Now, I'm not doing anything with the internet. And if there's anything here, you should probably check your running processes because you might have malware or something copying over files or doing some suspicious stuff. Oh, there we are. There's a DNS. Yeah. DNS requests should pretty much be the only thing that's passing through. And now what you can do is you can customize this interface to tiny little bit. You can press T to make it so that there's one line bros, you can press shift L to set up a logarithmic scale, which makes it a little bit easier to read. And, you know, let's test this out over here. Let's open up another terminal window and let's ping a website. Let's ping my own website. Denshi.org. So pinging it over here. As you can see, I'm sending information and there you go. There go the internet traffic little bars there. They're all increasing. It shows you how much I'm transferring over the network. I'm sending over 56 bytes of data. So there's a response there and I'm sending and receiving information from that website. So, yeah, you can use this tool to analyze system traffic. It's fantastic for telling if programs are spyware or not, actually, because if a program is spyware, then chances are it's sending a bunch of requests to a bunch of random websites and you should be able to see those in if top. It's also fantastic for seeing what's listening on your device, if anything. And if you're on a server, I guess you can use the spy on your users or something like that. But no, I really recommend if top is a fantastic tool, especially if you're trying to debug issues with networking or figure out where your bandwidth is going. Oh, by the way, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that if top can also display ports. So if you type H over here, you can see all the bindings for if top. And as you can see, you can toggle the DNS host resolution service, which gives you the reverse DNS hosts for what you're looking at. And you can also toggle service resolution and show the ports. So, for example, let's say I open up my matrix client. So matrix uses a specific port to contact over, which is should be 8484, something like 8484, something like that. Let me just open up my matrix client over here. It's blurred for obvious reasons once again. Now, if we press Shift S, it will show us the ports that it's sending over. And I'm blurring everything on my screen, but look, I promise you, I can see ports. OK. Yeah. Well, anyways, if top is a fantastic little tool you can use to analyze traffic and yeah, this next tool is for those who enjoy writing stuff on the terminal. So I have a sample text over here, which is written in Markdown with a bunch of spelling mistakes in it. I can use a program called a spell to check the mistakes in it. So a spell dash C for checking and then the name of the file. So running this, it will run through the entire file and show me what I've got wrong and give me suggestions for how to fix the spelling mistake. So as you can see over here, I wrote mistakes wrong. So I'll correct that by pressing one, which is the first option. I can ignore this because it's a website. So I'm going to just say I primary is spelled with two hours over here. So I'm going to press one to correct it. Secondary is spelled with two hours. I'm going to press one to correct it received. This is actually a really common mistake that people always ignore. I make this mistake sometimes. This is spelled wrong. It's actually received with an E before the I maths. I mean, that's just American spelling systems conflicting with the British writing of this physics. That's definitely spelled wrong. So I'm going to press one to correct it. Communication. Yeah, that's meant to have two M's in it. And religion is meant to have an I. OK, but you get the idea. This is a program that you can run through the text and correct everything. So I'm going to just press one for pretty much most of these. And hopefully it'll have fixed everything. And it also saves a backup of your file if you wanted to see the version before you made the changes. Oh, by the way, for a spell, you have to install specific language packs for your language. I have a spell dash and installed today. So that's the English version. You can get it for different languages as well. Now, this next thing is more of a tip rather than a specific tool. But I'm going to be using a program called xdg-user-durs-update. So that's a bit of a mouthful, but this program basically sets the directories for your desktop paradigm. So if you open up your file manager, you'll notice you'll always have, you know, the documents folder, the desktop folder, the downloads folder, the music, pictures, videos. You know what I'm talking about. This standard set of folders you have on your desktop. Let's say you don't like those. Let's say you want to change one of those. Like, for example, instead of pictures, I want to have a folder called, I don't know, img, because I'm so minimalist. I want to have three letter names for all of my folders, because I'm so cool. To do that, you can use this command, xdg-user-durs-update, and then do dash dash set, pictures, and then the absolute path of the directory. So dash home, and then my username, img. Now, if we open up our file manager, as you can see, img has the pictures icon and pictures no longer has it. So that is now our pictures folder, the img folder. And in fact, if we drag it to our little hot icons over here on the left, it even has the photo over there. So to revert this change, I'm going to just set it back to home Alex pictures, because I don't want to use img. And as you can see, it's back to normal now. Img is just a regular folder again. But that's how people have like custom user directory stuff on Linux. They use that program. So I guess if you've seen people do that before and you're confused as to how they do it, that's how. Now, this next program helps you interface with the clipboard on Xorg, assuming you know what that means. Just, you know, you can copy and paste stuff with it, but with your terminal. So you can use this program, it's called xclip. And let's say you want to pipe something to it like echo, I don't know. Hello there with a bunch of exclamation marks like this. And pipe that into Xclip will copy it to your selection primary. Now, the selection primary is like when you click the middle button on your mouse, which is not how people copy and paste anymore. We do like control V control C like that, which is different. So what you have to do is you copy specifically that a clipboard by giving it the option dash selection clipboard. So that's just one tiny little detail. You have to add that command for it to work. Press enter. And then if I try to copy paste my terminal, as you can see, there we go, I copied paste. Hello there. Now, you can also copy paste from files. So let's say Xclip dash selection clipboard. And I'm going to copy paste from a script for my documents called CNS. I think that stands for something numbering system. I forgot what it was as if I copy that a copy the file. And there's the script that I use. It's for school schedule stuff. It's pretty cool. But anyways, that's that little program that you can use to manage your clipboard from the terminal. It's used by some terminal utilities like pass, which is a password manager to copy stuff to your clipboard. So it's actually quite widely used. This next program helps you set wallpapers on your system. You might have seen this a few times around. I think I've talked about it before, but I'll just run through it again because I seem to be running every single system utility at the moment. It's called X wallpaper. So in my home directory, I have these two pictures, AWSC, that's the anti-windows social club wallpaper I use, and beach.jpg, which is just a picture of the beach. So if we run X wallpaper and then give it a display option, so let's say dash dash center and then let's say AWSC. As you can see, it sets that wallpaper that says anti-windows social club. I'll say I want to set that beach picture as my wallpaper. I'm going to type beach.jpg over here. And once it's set that, you might notice one thing. It zoomed it in a little bit too much because what it does is it tries to center the image and get the very center of it, which is not really what I want. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give it a different option called dash dash zoom, which is only going to zoom it in until it fits. So yeah, there you go. Now that beach picture looks far more appropriate. Now I'm going to just go back to the AWSC picture, though, because I like that a lot more. It looks pretty stylish. And by the way, X wallpaper does have a bunch of different options you can use besides zoom. So there's maximize, center, stretch, focus, tile, so on. So if you want to have a tiled wallpaper, you know, be my guest. Go ahead, Windows 95 style. This next program, I'm bringing it up because a lot of people seem to just not talk about it, despite it being very, very good. It's called Gummy, G-U-M-M-I, and it is a LaTeX editor. So you can type LaTeX code here on the left and it automatically displays and renders here on the right. So there's a sample document here and you can go through and add anything to here and it automatically displays over here. You can even form a bibliography with it. You can see the build log and it's just a fantastic little LaTeX editor. It's actually written entirely in C and GTK, which also makes it very minimal and fast. So yeah, Gummy, it's a very great way to write LaTeX documents. This next program is fantastic if you've ever had this experience. So, you know, when you open up like a PDF file or an image or something in Linux, you click it and then it opens up with a completely wrong program. In this case, it's opening up in Chrome, but I don't use Chrome to see my PDF. So I use a different reader called Zathura. So if you want to fix that from happening, all you got to do is use this program called Select Default Application. So running this, it'll show you a list of all the different programs and file types on your system. So in this case, I'm going to go buy programs or application. I'm going to go down all the way to Zathura and I'll get on to Zathura later. And as you can see, it shows you all the different files that it wants access to. So blue is the files it wants access to. And you can click this button over here that says Set as Default Application. So click that. And now I've opened a PDF again. As you can see, it opens in Zathura. Now, speaking of Zathura, you'll notice the PDF opened and it's actually custom colored. I have this little bar at the bottom. You can click D to see two pages in Zathura at the same time. You can select text in Zathura and it automatically copies it to your clipboard. So you can copy and paste it. Zathura is a fantastic PDF reader. I recommend it for anybody who wants to read PDFs in a minimal way on Linux. I won't get too much into the configuration and what not. I'll just show you mine. It's at .config Zathura and Zathura RC. So just very, very few lines of configuration to get all these features running. All I do is change the color and let it copy paste stuff to my clipboard. So yeah, I recommend Zathura PDF if you want to read PDFs on Linux. This next tool is for anybody who's struggling to connect to certain websites or access certain things or just needs a proxy. So on Linux, let's say I want to start a proxy using SSH, you might be familiar with this. If you have an SSH server, I'm going to connect to one of mine, GIO. And I'm going to open up a SOX5 proxy by using the dash capital D option. And the port I'm going to pick is just 9060. This is a common port, I guess. So running this, this shouldn't be anything too fancy. You should be somewhat familiar with how this stuff works. It opens up a SSH, which I'm going to blur out the details there because I don't want to see the IP address this is originating from. But basically, let's say I want to connect a terminal program through this SSH proxy. Well, that can be accomplished by using a program called proxy chains. So if I go into my proxy chains configuration, which is located in etsyproxychains.com, as you can see down over here, this is section called proxy list. Now down in the proxy list section, there is a default SOX4 proxy by default. This is for Tor. I'm going to just change this. I'm going to just comment that one out and write out my own SOX5127.0.0.1 as its local host. And then 9060, like the one that I just opened. Remember? So writing this configuration to that file and running proxy chains will allow me to run any, any program behind a proxy. So let's say I want to run, I don't know, the program I can use, like Curl. I want to run CURL, CURL, download stuff in the terminal. I'm going to run CURL and I'm going to run CURL if config.me. So that's a website that gives IP addresses. And as you can see, I'll blur it out, but I can see the IP address is different to the one that I had before. It's actually the IP address of my server. So you can also run proxy chains on graphical programs, like let's say you want to run Thunderbird behind proxy. You can do that, or maybe you want to run Firefox behind a proxy. And yeah, you can do that. Now it's running behind a proxy and look, it's all the telemetry going over to, to good old Mozilla, but yeah, and also opening up if config over here still shows me information that is related to my server, which I am once again blurring out. But yeah, with proxy chains, you can basically run any program, whether it's on the terminal or graphical behind a proxy, except for Chromium apparently, because it just crashes when you try to do that for some reason, that's probably Chromium's fault. Now we really enter the territory of utility because this next program is for helping you do math. It's called CALC. If you run CALC by default, it brings you to this pretty barren prompt that doesn't really have anything in it. Maybe type help. It shows you an example of basic stuff that it can do, like for example, it can factor numbers. Like let's say I want to factor this number, there you are. It's apparently, oh, I found a prime. Oh, that's pretty cool. 11 times something times a prime. Wow. Now, what you can do is you can type any kind of math equation in this and it'll do its best to try to solve it. So let's say I have like a cubic, like 3x to the power 3 minus x to the power 2 plus 9. Let's say I want to know when that's equal to 0. Now pressing enter over here will give me x is approximately equal to negative 1.339261209. I don't know if this can give you complex solutions as well, but it's a pretty powerful calculator. I recommend having a look at the help page to get an idea of the sort of stuff that you can work with it, but you're not limited just to this terminal interface. There's also a calculate GTK little program over here. I'm going to make it a little bit smaller so it's easier to read. You can type in expressions in here, like for example, 5x to the power of, wait a second, 5x to the power of 3 is equal to 7. Press enter, it'll get you an approximation of x. So yeah, this is a fantastic little tool that you can use to do math, both on the terminal and with this graphical interface. Now, like proxy chains, this is another program which is useful if you have a VPS or some kind of proxy, more specifically if you use SSH to access something remotely. Now, this is a program called SSHFS. Now, as the name implies, it's a file system, a Fuse file system that you can use to access files over SSH in your file manager. So you can run SSHFS and you can give it a mount point. I just made a directory called SSH and I'm just going to say I'm going to connect to root at dentchee.org. That's just my server and I'm going to connect to Ford slash, I don't know, Var www.dentchee.org HTML. That's just the HTML for my website. So at least there's nothing dangerous there and I'll set the correct port for it. I'll blur out the command for that. And running this will open up the contents in a Fuse file system. So once that's run, if we list SSH, it takes a while. But yeah, there we are. That's the contents of my website and in your file manager, you'll see your server mounted as a drive and you can access it and have a look at the contents inside once it connects that a few statement and logs them. Weirdly, it appears to not display any items whatsoever, but you can see them in the terminal. They're right over there. And in fact, we can go and change into that directory. And I don't know, go into the images directory and these are the images on my website if you want to look at that. And of course, you get unmounted just by pressing the unmount button in your file manager, as you would with Android file transfer. Well, I'm afraid that's the last of the obscure Linux tools we're looking at in today's video. If you have any suggestions or have anything you think I missed, please mention it in the comments below and share about any obscure Linux tools that you've used in your experience using the operating system. I've mentioned pretty much everything that's installed on my system and everything I remember installing on my system, but I'm sure I've missed something here or there. So make sure to get those comments in. I'm very curious to see what people think. As always, I hope you enjoyed this video. I've been Denchie. Goodbye.