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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?"
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!
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.