FOSSPicks
broot
Despite how complex our filesystems have become, often holding hundreds of thousands of files with dozens of directories across multiple sources and filesystems, our tools have changed very little. We jump around locations with cd. We still use ls to list the contents of a directory, sometimes carefully sorted with extra arguments or piped into a pager, or grep for searching. Failing that, find becomes the equivalent of a Google search for things you can't locate, or more commonly, can't remember whether you still have. What we need is a better way of doing these things, built for the age of the terabyte, and that's exactly what broot attempts to be. It's a command-line filesystem navigation tool that's written to be as intuitive as the tools we know while upgrading the experience to deal with the huge sizes and quantities of information we now need to parse when finding files and directories.
After a painless installation process, broot is actually started by typing the much shorter br on the command line. This transforms your terminal into a file and directory browser. Unlike an app like Midnight Commander, though, its output feels more like an interactive tree and ls session than a desktop application. You can move the cursor up and down the list, press Enter to select a folder and Alt+Enter to cd into that location. Launch with br -dp and you get permissions and dates alongside the file entries. From within broot itself, you can enter a command mode by pressing :. This allows you to enter commands like s to show the sizes of folders, or e to edit a file. It's very quick and works well and is a great alternative to losing track of exactly where you are on your filesystem.
Project Website
https://github.com/Canop/broot#installation
Audio book player
Cozy
Audio books have become hugely popular, and there's no doubt they're a great alternative to reading when you're traveling or otherwise can't read. Unless you're using a proprietary service, you can generally use any audio player to listen to them, and this means audio books have no special requirements – they can be managed and played just like albums and other pieces of music. But they can also benefit from some special considerations, especially when it comes to organizing a library, and extended playback control, such as chapter support. That's what the beautifully minimal Cozy offers – a minimal, distraction free Elementary-inspired GTK+3 environment from which you can select what to listen to and play it back.
Cozy operates a lot like an older version of iTunes, long before it became cluttered and full of distractions. This is a good thing, because the original iTunes design was excellent. A folder can be automatically monitored for audio books, and you can also drag and drop audio files into the main window to add them to your library. From the library, you can then sort by author, reader, and title – not all of which may be available from a free online source. After playback has commenced, you can change the playback speed to between 0.5 and 2.0 times the original, and the quality of the audio processing here is excellent. If you need to rapidly skip through a book, rather than slowly enjoy it, 1.6 speed should be perfectly digestible for most people. On the other end of the scale, if you want to fall asleep listening to a book, there's a timer, and the option to stop playback after the current chapter. It works perfectly and is well worth installing if you prefer your books read to you.
Project Website
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