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Name Your Favorite Bloat-Free Software
An anonymous reader writes "I prefer software that takes as little hard drive space and RAM as possible. I can't stand bloated software like iTunes, as compared to Foobar or classic Winamp; or Windows Media Player, as compared to VLC or Media Player Classic. What are some of your favorite applications which are a little less bloated?"
Lynx, anyone? :)
irfanview. Despite plugin capabilities, among many many other features, it is small, free, and faassssst compared to all the other image viewers I've tried (not all that many)
I'd like to see this list include things that are conveniently free of spyware/trojans, too!
Of course, now I'm on OS X, and the Mac port is fugly, so I haven't touched it in a while.
Putty is 412 KB for an SSH client that supports window resizing and has no installer! Doesn't hurt that it's open source either.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Foobar2k! Best audio player for Windows ever. http://foobar2000.org/ Quite minimalistic, but highly configurable. Very low memory footprint and plays basically everything.
http://www.tinyapps.org/
If you're running Windows, I also like Sumatra PDF
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/
(not sure if that's listed at the former or no, which is why I specifically mention it --- the balance of my preferred small programs are)
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Foxit Reader
Speedy thing goes in; speedy thing comes out.
Still the best mail client around. :)
We'll make great pets
If you use Windows I cannot sufficiently recommend Miranda IM. It's very lightweight (3MB download, 8MB RAM active) multi-IM client. You might call it the Foobar of Windows IM clients. It's got a fantastic community writing plugins and providing support on the official forums. The plugins are really numerous and cool too - Skype APIs, LCD display functionality, log analyzers, IM platform add-ons, out-of-office automators, a Windows uptime util, and hundreds more. It's also got great multinational localizations.
I switched to Miranda from GAIM (which I switched to from Trillian) and I haven't regretted it for one moment. It's very snappy and responsive, it automatically resizes vertically depending on how many contacts are online, it appears and disappears with a single click of the tray icon, it auto-updates the base program as well as the plugins... I could go on and on.
Give it a try. It's free! http://www.miranda-im.org/
I too like MS Paint for simplicity, but I disagree that it is a "bit crap." How many programs for Windows have existed almost unchanged for as long as Windows has existed. The actual workings and features have changed slightly over the years, but the interface is basically the same, and anybody who can turn on the computer can use it. And that's from a Microsoft product! I would suggest that it may be one of the top ten most useful programs ever made, largely because of the simplicity of it.
Xvid download: 628K, simple install DivX download: 22.5MB, loads of crapware, nagging reminders to upgrade, etc.
There was someone above who mentioned Trillian, but by far my favorite pick is Pidgin IM (formerly Gaim)
You avoid all of the bloat of AIM and MSN Messenger (which is now beyond ridiculous) plus you rid yourself of the need to install several messaging clients which further saves space and startup time plus it keeps your system tray (in windows) much cleaner. And the best part, it's available as open source for Windows and Linux!
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Seemingly simple tasks like copying music from your hard drive to your mp3 player have to be done in roundabout ways which for some reason involve playlists.
Hmmm. I don't have any playlists in iTunes (I prefer dealing with albums), and I have zero problems with simply dragging an album (or other batch of songs) onto my iPod in the pane on the left. I guess that's too difficult and "roundabout" for some people, though...
This guy's the limit!
uTorrent (http://www.utorrent.com), hands down.
219kb for an incredibly fast, RAM-efficient, full-blown, full-featured GUI Torrent client, with Web administration, scheduling, and all the stuff.
Now if the whole world could only code as well as uTorrent's author...
Editors: PFE (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/steveb/cpaap/pfe/def ault.htm) is a featureful and very slim editor for Windows
Encryption: TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/) takes less than 2 megs to hold the main executable along with both 32 and 63bit XP/Vista drivers. The Wizzard is a separate program that can optionally be included.
Browsers: Excluding text-only and phone browsers, Opera is a clear winner for the memory footprint. It's much slower on JS though, so I'm waiting to see which improvements they made with 9.5 on that.
Operating systems: The same Linux OS that runs my highly-powered workstations also runs on my 200Mhz 8MB ram/4MB flash router. It's just a matter of what you compile in. For me this seems like a winner too. Just look for tinny distros (Slackware with custom install is my reference as full-featured yet tiny distro, but there are also much smaller ones too) of just do it yourself with LFS.
I think Farbrausch are the gods of fitting the most into the smallest space.
check out some of their 4k and 64k demos and prepare to be amazed. fr-30 candytron is particularly good. or fr-025 the popular demo.
You can download their stuff here
There's an OSX port in the works (it's been reviewed online). If you can't wait unitil then, you can run uTorrent under WINE. Sure, you get some extra memory bloat, but the CPU and disk footprint should be the same (assuming you already have WINE installed).
Using GIMP, did you ever look at the setting called "Tile cache size" in Preferences / Environment? This sets the maximum amount of RAM that GIMP can use before it starts to swap some parts of images (tiles) to disk.
You can set this value to 4 GB and GIMP will happily use as much memory as you have. And it will be much, much faster when working with large images. As a rule of thumb, you should set this value to around 80% of your available memory.
PERL lacking bloat? You've got to be kidding!
If you want minimal, try out UnLambda or Pax. Unlambda is so minimal the functions (except a few built-ins) don't even get names. As a purely functional language, it also lacks variables. Despite this, it's Turing complete, so it can do anything you can do in such bloated messes as C++, PERL or Python. Pax is also Turing complete, and the page referenced above includes complete source code to its implementation, in a total of 175 lines of code (including white space, nice indenting, etc.)
What's truly sad is that even though it was apparently invented with the specific intent of being obfuscated, Pax programs are generally much more readable than most PERL. Oh, and just to address a couple of your other points: Pax doesn't need a library to do pattern matching -- in fact, the language is basically built entirely around pattern equations. The tutorial and reference manual together work out to just over 200 lines of text. Most of that is the USTL reference manual mentioned above.
Much as I hate to, I have to admit that even compared to PERL, programs in UnLambda are somewhat obfuscated -- though once you get used to its syntax, they're not quite as bad as they initially appear (rather the opposite of PERL in that respect).
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
When I'm using Windows, here's my selection:
Utilities:
7-Zip (Compression/Decompression)
Editpad (Tabbed Notepad replacement)
SequoiaView (Creates square treemaps of file system)
Multimedia:
VLC (Plays Anything)
Exact Audio Copy (Perfect CD Ripping)
LAME (High Quality MP3 Compression)
Audacity (Record off Line Inputs or Loopback)
Internet:
uTorrent (Bittorrent)
Firefox with FireFTP (Browswer, FTP)
Thunderbird with WebMail (Email Client)
TortiseSVN (Windows Shell Integration for Subversion)
Putty (Telnet/SSH)
Games:
OpenArena (Open source extension of Quake 3 codebase)
Battle of Wesnoth (Open source strategic fantasy game)
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Other nice un-bloated Windows utilities I'll add:
V, the file viewer
Foxit Reader for viewing PDFs
Crimson Editor for text files, though I more often use emacs.
20 FD ED: JSR $FDED - prints the content of the Accumulator to the screen - since what you read from the speaker line is technically random, it prints a random character to the screen - potentially including arrow keys and bell characters...
4C 00 03: JMP $0300 enough said.
MPlayer plays anything I throw at it, and is open source. I used to have VLC, but got disappointed in its buggy subtitle support. Best of all, Mplayer doesn't have a GUI, so the visual bloat is minimal.
Not bloatware?? Huh? News to me...
Firefox, Thunderbird, TortiseSVN are anything but Bloat-Free.
In the past six months to a year FireFox, Thunderbird regularly take up 130 MB by themselves. I once had Thunderbird manage RSS feeds.... That was a mistake! And don't even ask me about how SLOW Firefox has gotten with larger HTML pages.
TortiseSVN has this annoying habit that it has to cache everything and if you have any SVN projects of any size it takes ages to do anything.
What annoys me about these applications is that they take the attitude, "oh lets just load it into RAM after all everybody has enough." I get annoyed because I run Virtual Machines and these apps keep slowing everything down.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Have a look at ps -eH under your zsh process next time you are in the middle of a ">". It spawns a cat to do its dirty work.
DDL
Portable Freeware is my favorite site for programs that will run on a USB flash drive (or floppy if they're small enough) without the need to install on the host machine and create registry entries and the like. The focus of the site is portability, but generally speaking that also means bloat-free.
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