Aswath's List of Cool Tools & Resources

A whole knowledge base to take inspiration out of!

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A multitude of tools and apps, as well as other resources showing where I am personally and acting somewhat as a knowledge base for my usage.

All of these tools and/or resources are free and open source unless specified

Open source software	Free software	AI software	Personally Recommended software
Symbol:	Symbol:	Symbol:	Symbol:
OSS	Free	AI	🌟

Contents

• Desktop Apps
• CLI Applications
• Operating systems
• Tools
• Frameworks
• Selfhosted Apps
• Resources
• Miscellaneous

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Desktop apps

Table of Contents

• Alacritty - A minimalist, high-performance GPU rendered terminal emulator. Free OSS

• Antigravity - An agent-first AI development environment from Google for delegating coding tasks to autonomous agents. Free AI

• Antimicrox - Assign game controller input to keys on the computer. Free OSS

• Blender - A piece of free and open source software that enables a full pipeline for people wanting to build useful items with 3d in computing, Free OSS

• Bottles - Software that is helping manage windows software running on linux with a great GUI. Free OSS

• Cursor - An AI-powered code editor for codebase-aware chat, edits, and agentic development workflows. Free AI

• Flameshot - Cross-platform screenshots with various annotation features. Free OSS 🌟

• Ghostty - A novel terminal emulator built in Zig that combines performance and feature set. Free OSS

• Gimp - A free and open source alternative to Photoshop. Free OSS

• Godot - A free and open source game engine that allows to create both 2d and 3d games intuitively. Free OSS

• Kiro IDE - An agentic AI IDE from AWS built around specs, plans, and structured coding workflows. Free AI

• LMMS - A DAW with advanced features for power users, fully open source and free. Free OSS

• LocalSend - A simple, effective way to send arbitrary files and data over a network. Free OSS

• Logseq - A knowledge base creation application that will help to streamline ideas and parts of daily work to make accessing the knowledge easier. Free OSS

• Neovide - A simple, no-nonsense, cross-platform graphical user interface for Neovim. Free OSS

• OBS Studio - A popular open source tool to record and stream customizable video recordings. Free OSS

• Rawtherapee - A great RAW editor and open source alternative to Lightroom Free OSS

• Recordly - An open source screen recording application aimed at the use case of demo/product videos Free OSS

• Responsively - A must-have tool for developers that enables simple and easy testing for multiple device types Free OSS

• Scrcpy - Application that allows for the control of android devices from desktop operating systems. Free OSS

• Shotcut - A video editor that is built for heavy users and is open to the public for easy use. Free OSS

• Syncthing - Syncthing is a P2P file synchronization utility, designed to sync files between devices over LAN or the Internet. Free OSS

• VeraCrypt - Popular open source tool that facilitates filesystem-level encryption. Free OSS

• Visual Studio Code - The most popular code editor of the past decade. Free

• Vlc - A media player for multiple platforms, with support for local and remote video and audio. Free OSS

• VSCodium - A fully open source licensed and usable build of VSCode, which by default has closed-source binaries Free OSS 🌟

• WezTerm - WezTerm is a powerful cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer written by @wez and implemented in Rust. Free OSS

• Windows Terminal - It is a multi-tabbed terminal emulator developed by Microsoft for Windows 10+ as a replacement for Windows Console. Free OSS

• Windsurf - An AI-powered IDE for code generation, context-aware edits, and agentic software development. Free AI

• Xournalpp - A pdf editor that allows for custom annotations on top of a pdf canvas. Free OSS

• Zed - A fast collaborative code editor with built-in AI integrations and agent support. Free OSS AI

CLI Applications

Table of Contents

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• Act - Run GitHub Actions workflows locally, useful for testing CI before pushing. Free OSS

• Age - A simple modern file encryption tool with small keys and unix-style usage. Free OSS

• Agg - A command line tool to turn asciinema terminal recordings into animated GIF files. Free OSS

• Algernon - An open source web server with rendering markown and much more out of the box. Free OSS

• Android Debug Bridge - The official command line tool to manipulate and debug android devices/applications. Free OSS

• Aria2 - A command line downloader with fast speeds Free OSS 🌟

• Asciinema - Record terminal sessions and share them as lightweight text-based recordings. Free OSS

• Bat - A cat alternative with syntax highlighting and much more. Free OSS

• Broot - A modern tree alternative, with many more features than its predecessor. Free OSS

• Cava - A audio visualizer for the terminal, with loads of features Free OSS

• Cheat.sh - A cheatsheet source that can be accessed from the cli, that provides a massive cheatsheet library from multiple sources. Works best from a unix-like os, but can be used with curl/wget/httpie Free OSS

• Chezmoi - A dotfile manager with a high number of features and tools to make managing dotfiles easy Free OSS 🌟

• Claude Code - Anthropic's agentic command-line coding tool for delegating software tasks from the terminal. AI

• Cline CLI - An AI coding agent interface for planning, editing, and running development tasks with user approval. Free OSS AI

• Cmus - A command line music player. Does its 1 job extremely well, following the UNIX philosophy. Free OSS

• Continue CLI - A command-line interface for Continue's open-source AI coding assistant and agent workflows. Free OSS AI

• Copilot CLI - A GitHub CLI extension that uses Copilot to explain commands and suggest shell commands. Free AI

• Croc - An open source solution to transfer files quickly and easily between systems, and a relay is very easily self-hostable. Free OSS

• Curl - A classic command line tool to transfer data with URLs, useful for testing and downloading from the internet. Free OSS

• Delta - A tool to see differences between text files. Free OSS

• Dive - A tool to inspect docker image layers and see what is taking up space. Free OSS

• Duf - A df alternative that is fast and informative. Free OSS

• Dust - An alternative to du to see storage usage. Free OSS

• Eget - A utility to quickly install prebuilt binaries from GitHub releases. Free OSS

• Exa - A fast and modern alternative for the ls command. Free OSS

• Fastfetch - A fast neofetch-like tool that prints system information with lots of customization. Free OSS

• Fd - A modern alternative to the find command. Free OSS

• Ffmpeg - A extremely useful console application to work with videos and audio. Free OSS

• Freeze - Make good-looking images of code snippets and terminal output from the command line. Free OSS

• Fzf - A fuzzy finder that can be used in many environments, from vim to cd'ing Free OSS

• Gemini CLI - Google's open-source AI agent for bringing Gemini into terminal coding workflows. Free OSS AI

• Gh - The official github cli. Now you can use github without even opening a browser! Free OSS 🌟

• Git - An amazing and highly used version control system. Free OSS 🌟

• Gitui - A terminal git interface for browsing history, staging changes, and managing commits without leaving the shell. Free OSS

• Glow - A markdown renderer for the command line. Free OSS

• GnuPG - A full encryption and signing tool implementing OpenPGP for files, messages, and keys. Free OSS

• Goose - Block's open-source local AI agent for coding, automation, and tool-using workflows. Free OSS AI

• GoReleaser - Automates building and publishing releases for Go projects across multiple platforms. Free OSS

• Gource - A source control visualization tool that shows repository history as an animated tree. Free OSS

• Gping - Ping with a graph. Free OSS

• Gum - A set of terminal UI helpers to make shell scripts interactive and nicer to use. Free OSS

• Horcrux - Splits a file into encrypted pieces so recovery can require multiple fragments. Free OSS

• Httpie - An http client meant to be used with api's. Also look at curlie for a more curl-like product, and xh for sending requests. Free OSS 🌟

• HTTrack - A website copier that downloads pages and assets for offline browsing and archival. Free OSS

• Hyperfine - An insane benchmarking tool to compare speeds . Free OSS

• Jq - A parser for all things json Free OSS

• Json-server - A cool way to set up a local mock json api for use to mock a real API. Free OSS

• Kiro CLI - A command-line companion for Kiro's spec-driven agentic development workflows. Free AI

• Lazydocker - A terminal UI for managing Docker containers, images, volumes, and logs in one place. Free OSS

• Lazygit - A terminal UI for Git that makes staging, commits, branches, and history easier to handle. Free OSS

• Llama.cpp - A lightweight inference stack for running large language models locally across many platforms. Free OSS AI

• Lychee - A link checker for markup formats Free OSS

• Miniserve - Serve files over HTTP quickly from the command line with a simple temporary file server. Free OSS

• Mise - A dev environment manager for tool versions, tasks, and environment variables. Free OSS

• Monolith - Save a web page and its assets into one self-contained HTML file. Free OSS

• Mpv - This tool is almost like VLC, but for the cli, in the sense that it can play most of everything you throw at it, even twitch streams, and even supports ascii output! Free OSS

• Neovim - A modernized Vim fork with better defaults for plugins, terminals, remote UIs, and scripting. Free OSS

• Onefetch - Neofetch, but for git repositories, showing project stats and metadata right in the terminal. Free OSS

• OpenAI Codex - OpenAI's open-source terminal coding agent for editing, running, and reasoning over codebases. Free OSS AI

• Opencode - An open-source terminal AI coding agent with a TUI for planning and editing code. Free OSS AI

• OpenSSH - Secure shell tools for remote login, file transfer, and encrypted network connections. Free OSS

• Pandoc - A universal document converter that can move text between markdown, HTML, LaTeX, docx, PDF workflows, and much more. Free OSS

• Pastel - Manipulate and edit colors on the cli Free OSS

• Pdm - A python dependency manger with support for pyproject.toml, a modern alternative for setup.py Free OSS

• Poetry - A depnedency manager for python that is miles ahead of pip or other apps. Free OSS

• Radare2 - A tool that is more than a hex editor, a full fledged cli debugger. Free OSS

• Rclone - Manage and sync files across cloud storage providers and local filesystems from the command line. Free OSS

• Restic - A cross platform backup system with many features regarding security and general use. Free OSS 🌟

• Ripgrep - Modern alternative to grep. It is much faster than what it tries to replace. Free OSS

• Ruff - A very fast Python linter and formatter written in Rust. Free OSS

• Rye - A Python project and package management tool for handling interpreters, dependencies, and virtual environments. Free OSS

• Sd - A modern alternative to what sed has to offer. Free OSS

• Sha256sum - Verify file integrity by calculating and checking SHA-256 hashes. Free OSS

• SingleFile - Save a complete webpage into a single HTML file for offline viewing or archival. Free OSS

• Soft-serve - A selfhosted git server accessible from the terminal. Free OSS

• Taskwarrior - A streamlined task manager on the cli. Free OSS

• Tealdeer - A client for the tldr pages that uses a cache approach, and allows for offline use and custom pages, making it my personal favorite tldr client. Free OSS 🌟

• Tectonic - A modern TeX engine that downloads needed packages and builds LaTeX documents. Free OSS

• Termux - A terminal emulator and Linux environment for Android, with packages and shell tools. Free OSS

• TeX Live - A large TeX distribution with LaTeX, related programs, fonts, and documentation. Free OSS

• Timg - An ascii image and GIF viewer for the command line, with many options to enhance viewing. Free OSS

• Tldr - A simpler to read and easier to read community-based alternative to manpages Free OSS

• Tmux - A very useful terminal multiplexer to multitask as well as improve productivity. Free OSS 🌟

  • Tmuxinator - An addon that allows you to manage projects and open a full environment quickly. Free OSS

• Tokei - Show code statistics quickly, including language breakdowns, files, comments, and lines. Free OSS

• Topgrade - A full command line update system Free OSS

• Typst - A modern markup-based typesetting system for creating documents without as much LaTeX ceremony. Free OSS

• Ubi - A universal binary installer for downloading and installing prebuilt releases from GitHub. Free OSS

• UPX - Compress executable files while keeping them runnable. Free OSS

• Uv - A very fast Python package and project manager written in Rust. Free OSS

• VHS - Terminal recorder with configuration rather than recording. Free OSS

• Viddy - A modern watch command with scrollback, diffs, and time-machine style history. Free OSS

• Watchexec - Run commands automatically when files change, useful for rebuilds and local dev loops. Free OSS

• Wget - A reliable command line downloader for web pages and files, including recursive downloads. Free OSS

• Xh - A friendly and fast HTTP request tool, similar to HTTPie but written in Rust. Free OSS

• Yt-dlp - An awesome alternative to yt-dlp with a lot of improvements, and even sponsorblock support Free OSS 🌟

• Zellij - A terminal workspace and multiplexer for panes, tabs, and shareable layouts. Free OSS

• Zoxide - A modern alternative to cd that allows for quick movement and remembering directories. Free OSS

Operating systems

Table of Contents

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• Linux - Technically a kernel, but in this context I use it(gnu/linux) to describe the underlying system under many free and open source distributions of linux. Free OSS 🌟
  • Arch Linux - A open source distribution built on linux, staying on the bleeding edge, but providing users the latest software Free OSS

Tools

Table of Contents

• Distrobox - A tool used to spin up multiple operating systems with access to your home sirectory and leverages container technologies like podman and docker to do so. Free OSS

• Docker - A open tool for containerization, to run applications on multiple places the same. Free OSS 🌟

  • Portainer - Simply, a web ui for docker, but is extremely feature rich, to the level that docker cli is no more necessary when this tool is used. Free OSS

• GitHub Copilot - GitHub's AI coding assistant for completions, chat, and agentic software development workflows. Free AI

• KVM - Linux kernel virtualization support for running virtual machines with hardware acceleration. Free OSS

• OpenClaw - An open-source autonomous AI assistant framework for running persistent agents through messaging and tool integrations. Free OSS AI

• Podman - Another container manager, known as podman, that uses a non-root system with no daemon and a focus on the lifetime of containers. Free OSS

• QEMU - A machine emulator and virtualizer for running operating systems and different architectures. Free OSS

• Vagrant - A source-available tool to provision reproducible isolated development environments using a variety of backend providers. Free

• X11docker - Run GUI applications or desktops in Docker and Podman containers with a security focus. Free OSS

Frameworks

Table of Contents

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• Bash-it - A full featured bash frameworks that comes with batteries and a plugin system out of the box. Free OSS

• Hugo - A fast static site generator for building websites from content and templates. Free OSS

• MdBook - A tool to build online books and documentation from Markdown files. Free OSS

• Oh-my-bash - Another bash framework which tries to replicate oh-my-zsh for bash. Free OSS

• Pocketbase - A small backend in a single executable with database, auth, file storage, and an admin UI. Free OSS

Selfhosted Apps

Table of Contents

• Caddy - A web server and reverse proxy with automatic HTTPS as a major built-in feature. Free OSS

• Code-server - Run VS Code on a server and use it from a browser. Free OSS

• Dufs - A simple file server with uploads, search, access control, and WebDAV support. Free OSS

• File Browser - A selfhosted web file manager for browsing, uploading, and managing server files. Free OSS

• Phpmyadmin - Web UI for managing MySQL and MariaDB databases without living in the database shell. Free OSS

• Ttyd - Share a terminal over the web through a small selfhosted server. Free OSS

• Uptime-kuma - A selfhosted uptime monitor with status pages and notification integrations. Free OSS 🌟

Resources

Table of Contents

• Awesome Cheatsheets - A collection of cheat sheets for programming languages, frameworks, and dev tools. Free OSS

• Awesome Lists - A huge index of curated awesome lists across many software and learning topics. Free OSS

• Build Your Own X - A collection of tutorials for learning by rebuilding tools like shells, databases, and emulators. Free OSS

• Carbon - A tool to make beautiful pictures of code. Free OSS 🌟

• Cloud Shell - A theia-like IDE to run code in a full-featured web ide, with 5gb of storage. Free 🌟

• Draw.io - An open source whiteboard and diagramming tool that I use to plan projects and sketch outlines. Free OSS

• Excalidraw - An open source web whiteboard. I personally use it for notes. Free OSS

• Farside - A redirection service that allows to load balance and choose between multiple privacy friendly alternative frontends Free OSS

• Free-prog-books - A resource to find free books relating to tech. Free OSS 🌟

• Github1s - A tool to show the structure of github repositories, as if viewing them in VSCode. Free OSS

• Gitpod - A cloud dev environment to build a place to code in in no time! Free OSS 🌟

• Hacker News - A news source for tech and other related topics. Free

• Introduction to programming and CS basics - A good video about the basics of CS, a great reference video. Free

• Laws of Software Engineering - A collection of short software engineering principles and tradeoffs worth remembering. Free

• Modern-unix-commands - A set of modern linux alternatives for older commands. Free OSS

• Project Based Learning - A curated list of programming tutorials that teach by building real projects. Free OSS

• Project Ideas and Resources - A list of app ideas with project goals, user stories, and resources for practice. Free OSS

• Roadmap.sh - Developer roadmaps and guides for learning skills across different tech roles. Free OSS

• The Algorithms - A reference collection of algorithms and data structures implemented in many languages. Free OSS

• Tldraw - Another open source whiteboard app with a simpler overall model. Free OSS

Miscellaneous

Table of Contents

• Conventional Commits - A commit message convention that makes changelogs and semantic versioning easier to automate. Free OSS

Thanks For Reading

Hopefully, you found some use out of this list, whether it be a tool, resource, or application that you needed in your workflow.