Useful Open Source Tools

This is a list of Open Source tools that I use. I use them because once one is used to their mechanisms, they are extremely efficient.

• Vim - a file editor
• SeaMonkey - a browser like Firefox but better design. It uses the same core as Firefox.
• OpenOffice - a word processing package, a slide show producer, a drawing program, a spread sheet. It does everything that Word does, but it is not proprietary and has a compressed XML format that is an international standard. Unlike Word, OpenOffice can create PDF files directly from your document. It's word processing done `right' except that LaTeX beats it of course.
• LaTeX - A typesetting program that produces the most beautiful documents you can imagine. LaTeX uses the best way to write documents, which is to separate the task of writing from the task of typesetting. You can concentrate on writing and not have to worry about where the lines are going. All the physicists and mathematicians use it because it typesets equations and scientific notation beautifully. Also, since the files are simple text, they will last forever, unlike the binary document files that proprietary systems use.
• skim - a PDF viewer that you can set to referesh when the file changes. In conjunction with LaTeX, one gets to see the final typeset version on the screen while manipulating the raw text. No mouse use is needed to write your paper, which saves a lot of time and painful effort.
• sam2p is a very fast and efficient converter from raster images to eps. This is my copy since source code seems to be gone from the original source.

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  Obtain the following with fink or mac ports.
• Xfig - a nice drawing program.
• XV - a nice program for viewing images.
• GNU Aspell - a spell checking program
• GNU wget - grabs web pages off the web
• Mutt E-Mail Client - a text based emailer. These are much faster and much less awkward than web based ones.

Schneider Lab
origin:    2010 Jun 15
updated: 2018 Nov 21