The world of Open Source software has created some amazing things over the years. While the big names in Open software like GIMP and Open Office are practically household words among those of us in the ‘know’, there are still many super cool applications that have yet to be discovered from the Open Source realm. In this article from NewsForge, we have an opportunity to learn of some of them and also what makes each of them so unique.

While it’s easy to sing the praises of big applications like OpenOffice.org or the GIMP (and rightly so), the heavyweights of the open source world cast a long shadow over a host of much smaller, lesser-known apps that may do just what you need. One of the original philosophies behind Unix was that a program should do one thing and do it well. Here are a few programs that embody that philosophy.

e3 text editor

The e3 console text editor takes minimalism to the max - the binary is a minuscule 13KB in size! So why use this instead of [insert the name of your favorite editor here]? If you’re anything like me, you’ll find a lot of your editing tasks are very short — little more than tweaks. e3 starts instantly and has all the basic features you could want, including find/replace, block cut/copy/paste, and undo. For complex tasks I use a more feature-packed program, but for a quick change to /etc/fstab or something similar, this little editor wins every time.

e3 also does its best to be ubiquitous. It works on a whole host of operating systems, and perhaps best of all, it supports keyboard mappings that emulate WordStar, Pico, emacs, vi, and Nedit. You can hardly fail to feel at home with it.

Xfce window manager

GUIs tend to fall into two camps: the huge (KDE, GNOME) and the tiny (Fluxbox, FVWM). Xfce stands in the middle ground, offering more speed than the former, and more features than the latter. The interface is slick, clean, and highly responsive, even on slower machines. While it’s less configurable than the big boys, there’s enough here to keep most people happy, and the Xfce Goodies project offers a number of useful plug-ins for the main panel.

Personally, I don’t get on with Xfce’s native file manager, but Xfce is GNOME and KDE compliant, so a quick search on SourceForge or freshmeat provides alternatives and additions galore. The imminent 4.2 release looks set to improve things across the board and will hopefully give Xfce the profile it deserves.