The world of Linux software is hard to navigate, but with there are a lot of good ones worth checking out if you know where to look. Have a look at this text drawing app, packet analyzer, and Wikipedia browser.
All of the apps I found this week have a common theme of reading text. The text of network packets, of ASCII characters, and of Wikipedia entries are all being made readable with these free and open source apps.
ASCII Draw
Make cool drawings with text characters
Do you like those pieces of artwork that are made up of text characters and that people often send in text chats? It’s called ASCII art, and while you may think you need to work on every line and character one-by-one to get it right, that doesn’t have to be the case.
Meet ASCII Draw. It’s a graphical application that makes creating ASCII art a cinch. You can select specific characters you want to draw with freehand style, or select shapes that make filling in large swaths a fast and easy process. There are familiar graphic editing tools, including a fill tool, an eraser, and a picker for characters you want to quickly copy.
When you’re done, you can save it as a text file or just copy it to the clipboard for quick sharing.
Aside from fun group chats, ASCII Draw has some serious practical application. You can use it for documentation and technical diagrams that render in single-space fonts. It can save you from need to make vectors. There’s also a built-in table generator, a tree builder for hierarchical structures, and and a move tool for easily shifting characters and elements around.
You can download ASCII Draw from Flathub or Snapcraft.
bandwhich
A window into your network utilization
If you’ve ever been curious to monitor what’s going on network-wise with your Linux PC and want a digestible feed, look no further than bandwhich. It’s a terminal user interface that monitors network interfaces and analyzes packets, much like tcpdump does. Not only that, but it also cross-references them with the processes running on your system to show you which systems are communicating with the network.
The bandwhich tool shows you all of this in a live, ever-changing list of active network processes so you can see activity as it happens. It also tries to resolve hostnames using DNS lookups so you can get a good idea of where processes are connecting. This presentation is a lot easier to digest than tcpdump, and you can also pause and unpause the feed to inspect as needed.
However, beware that bandwhich requires elevated privileges to operate. So after installing it, you’ll need to run it as follows:
sudo bandwhich
Bandwhich isn’t available in many Linux repositories. However, you can install Bandwhich from Snapcraft or on Arch systems using the sudo pacman -S bandwhich command. If you aren’t on Arch and don’t want to use a Snap, you can download binaries from the bandwhich GitHub release page. Of course, you can always build it from source code as well.
Related
Windows networking commands in Linux: 5 equivalents you should know (plus WSL tricks)
Moving from Windows to Linux? Here are the networking commands to use instead—plus a WSL bonus.
Wike
Read the largest encyclopedia without your browser
Do you spend a lot of time looking through Wikipedia’s vast compendium of knowledge? Wike is a purpose-built for Wikipedia browsing, and it’s designed to integrate with the GNOME shell. With the integration enabled, you can search Wikipedia right inside your desktop search bar.
That’s just the beginning though. When you open the Wike app, it also gives you a table of contents sidebar so you can hop to specific headings from wherever you are. You can bookmark pages for later reading, track your reading history, preview links before clicking them, and toggle languages with a click.
Wike also has features similar to your browser you don’t have to miss out on. You can tab articles, search pages, and navigate forward and back. There are keyboard shortcuts, including for bookmarking and printing pages. You can also customize your experience by adjusting colors and fonts, and also toggling light modes.
Related
How to Install and Use Linux Apps on a Chromebook
Turns out, Chromebooks are more capable than I thought.
And don’t worry: random articles are built-in. There’s even a built-in keyboard shortcut for it: Alt+R.
You can find Wike on Flathub and on Snapcraft. It’s also installable from many Linux repositories:
sudo apt install wike #Debian and Ubuntu
sudo dnf install wike #Fedora
sudo pacman -S wike #Arch
sudo zypper install wike #openSUSE
If nothing I mentioned today floats your boat, be sure to check out the Linux apps I looked at last week. It included a versatile image viewer, a song identifier, and a substitute for ping.
