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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?"
Now that one's easy! `ed`. It's the standard editor for a reason, after all.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Lynx, anyone? :)
suppose to suggest any when the article mentions the two any basic geek needs? D:
Magic Mail Monitor
PuTTy is my clear cut winner. A little over a meg for a full installer with all the bells and whistles, what's not to love?
http://blog.heavensdomain.net
Small & Quick.. all though lately it has been eating massive amounts of memory at times the developers are quick to respond and work with the community to isolate & fix them!
7zip is my second one. Fast and nag free!
Trillian would be my 3rd but i'm anxiously awaiting release of the new product as the current publicly released IM client has been stagnant.
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!
Bonzi Buddy
QED.
Website Hosting
Of course, now I'm on OS X, and the Mac port is fugly, so I haven't touched it in a while.
I would guess that whatever your favorite non-bloat software is, it is most likely in Damn Small Linux...
] call -151
* 300: ad 30 c0 20 ed fd 4c 00 03
* 300g
Hours of random entertainment!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Foobar2k! Best audio player for Windows ever. http://foobar2000.org/ Quite minimalistic, but highly configurable. Very low memory footprint and plays basically everything.
Word vs Notepad?
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
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.
I know it's a bit crap, but I must confess to quite liking MS Paint for it's simplicity. When all you need is to crop a screendump and save it as a JPG, nothing beats it!
Other than that, I'd second the VLC and Winamp combo. Ever since there has been iPod support in Winamp (via a plugin or 'out of the box') I haven't used anything else.
In the Windows world, how about stuff made for U3 memory sticks?
I'd say that PuTTY is also pretty utilitarian - does what it needs without any fancy installs or bloating - BRILLIANT!
The Digital Sorceress
Especially in an era of 500gb HDs and 2GB of RAM.
My criteria are usability, utility, and functionality. For that reason iTunes is second on my list, with WinAMP all the way down at the bottom of 50. iPhoto recently shot up to #1 due to it's Web Gallery feature: Select an event, publish, and then edit the gallery at your leisure. The gallery is updated on the website "behind the scenes", so you never need to synchronize or revisit it, it's all done automatically.
iTunes is high on that list for a similar reason. Set up a few "Smart Playlists", and music is automatically added or removed from my queue as necessary depending on playcount, on ranking, on genre, or new additions. I never need to do anything except insert a CD, vote up or down my like of any particular song at the moment, or plug in my iPod.
Gives me more time to do other things... like rollerblading, taking pictures, or talking to people.
GPL Deconstructed
No match there. Aim takes up so much ram and pops up an ad filled browser window with all the latest news of celebrities I dont care about
Anyone recalls Norton Commander? NC, or its free Linux alternative, MC... simple, powerful, no hand-holding, the way any file manager got to be!
http://www.automatiq.se
I just noticed today that Vista business edition companied by office install and recovery files for hp laptop leaves you with almost 400,000 files on your hd.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
I jest.
I like both these WMs. Fluxbox is my favorite out of the two.
IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.com) . There's no better for image viewing an batch manipulation.
Actually, those are the only 2 freeware programs I use. The rest, I pay for them. I don't use freeware and OS programs just because. That's not a religion and I firmly believe in commercial applications, so I help the developers buying the programs I need, even if there is an almost identical free variant.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
uTorrent is one of the cleanest, smallest, most efficient pieces of software I have ever had the pleasure to use. Since switching to OSX a few months ago (I bought a Macbook Pro planning to run XP, and the switch just seemed to happen), my one real regret is that uTorrent is Windows only. I've been reduced to using Azureus, which gets the job done, but is horribly bloated.
So, my nomination is for uTorrent, and if anyone knows of a similar package for OSX I would love to hear it.
tee. Only two command-line options.
The way it should be. It's name is it's documentation too.
gus
.. if only.
Here's my list: OpenOffice, e-Sword, Firefox, Google Desktop, TightVNC, Thunderbird, Picasa, AVG Anti-Virus, GIMP, IrfanView, VLC Media Player, FileZilla, 7zip
Stupid lame filter nuked my <ul>
Read my blog: HansMast.com
and continue the flamewar from below to boot...
Opera.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
Foxit Reader
Speedy thing goes in; speedy thing comes out.
Still the best mail client around. :)
We'll make great pets
Also, as the rest of modern desktop Linux has bloated to the point where Konsole and Gnome Terminal aren't bottlenecks any more I've moved away from it in favor of tabs, but I used to only use rxvt instead of heavier alternatives. Gnome Terminal in particular used to have visible lag, and I'm a lot more tolerant of that stuff in a multimedia app than in a freaking shell.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
It has to be one of the most useful personal documentation, note taking tools in existence. It's basically a wiki for the desktop. All the information is stored in wiki style text files so even if you want to switch to something else, it's easy.
o jects/zim/index.shtml
http://pardus-larus.student.utwente.nl/~pardus/pr
Deleted
Office Suite: Appleworks
IDE: Merlin Pro
Desktop Publishing: The Print Shop
Media Player: Music Construction Set
Entertainment: Wavy Navy
irssi is an IRC client which works great with screen and Putty, all three programs are bloat free :)
there's no smaller peripheral data transfer program still in use!
Finger just sounds too dirty.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
linux on a floppy
I like dwm, it's a rather tiny and simple window manager. Watching their mailing list is entertaining at times, the amount of effort invested in deleting lines of code is pretty impressive.
http://www.suckless.org/wiki/dwm
The tarball for it is only 19k, and doing a wc -l on all the *.c files gives 1781 lines. RSS on my system right now is only 1336K, which is smaller than a single bash shell. Probably not something someone infatuated with glittery stuff would like to run but it's definitely a small program.
Doesn't get much more bloat free than that.
What are some of your favorite applications which are a little less bloated?
For compilers, this is easy. Borland Turbo Pascal.
In 29K or so it amazed me they could pack in all of:
But will agree, it is ancient and I haven't used it for years.
IZarc as oposed to Winzip, or WinRAR or ... pretty much any other compression program
Konqueror.
No, seriously.
Before my Clamshell iBook (running Gentoo Linux) died, my alternatives for web browsing were Konqueror and Firefox. I found that, despite the heaviness of qt versus gtk+, Konqueror was much nicer than Firefox in terms of both memory and CPU usage. (Opera was on par with Konqueror but... it gave me the creeps to use, I don't know why.)
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
I think I originally heard about this projecto n /. quite a while ago (sorry, to lazy to search for the article). .theprodukkt Is an amazing project where a simple but amazing FPS is crammed into 65k! I think they also designed much of the game in a 3D editor that is also smaller than 65k.
I like Opera, modo, foobar2000, VLC Media Player, 7zip, Pidgin, Process Explorer, uTorrent, TCPView, Foxit Reader, and WinDirStat.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
I like MOVEit Freely for the same reason...(it's a command-line FTP/SSL client for Windows)
My nominee is the little Unix utility that everyone loves to hate: vi It sucks just as bad as it did twenty years ago but it has not gotten worse--which in my book is a plus.
My favourite bittorrent client is rTorrent
"rtorrent is a BitTorrent client for ncurses, using the libtorrent library. The client and library is written in C++ with emphasis on speed and efficiency, while delivering equivalent features to those found in GUI based clients in an ncurses client."
Perl is my favorite unbloated language. I know you laugh but hear me out. Pick up the O-reily quick reference for almost any major language. with the exception of fortran (:-) the perl one is not just a little bit thinner, it's more than half as thick as most and that includes c++.
Basically I find it really annoying that to get even a fraction of the functionality of stock perl one has to import some library. Why do I have to import Regular expression or Strings in python? or for that matter, just to get the command line args I have to import a freakin library? And then why does it take a zillion pages in the quickref to explain it when it has less fearutes than stock perl.
I don't want to rag on python here and this is not a flame to say perl is better than python. (python is in very many ways superior to perl for organized project programming. It also used to be easier to read since there was only one way to do something but that zen is gone now.)
Once you learn perl you don't need a big set of reference books to explain every obscure library. Just the manpages or a quick reference will do. I hate language bloat.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
For Win...Vuepro is an amazing picture viewer. For *nix ....well, vi, of course. Maybe vim but vi does whats needed.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Rockbox is my favorite piece of unbloated software.
Great care is taken to keep the core as small as possible, while maintaining focus on the fundamental goal of being the best DAP firmware possible.
with and application to application comparison. It's foolish and pointless. It has to be on a feature bases.
I can write a mp3 player far more compact then winamp, does that mean winamp is bloated? No, it may mean that mine is a command line that only plays mp3, no other feature at all.
So, when you have a piece of software that has all the features of iTunes, then you can compare for bloat. and I mean ALL the features, like being able to buy music, get podcasts, play TV shows, etc...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
90% of responses above recommend PuTTY, which is a great program. However, if you're looking for the ultimate in bloat-free software that hasn't been mentioned:
Microsoft Word 5.1a for Mac. Some say it is the greatest word processor ever made. I say it's close.
vim. Easily one of the best editors for any platform. And sure, it's more bloated than vi, but it's so much more powerful and usable.
rm -rf
Windows 2000 & Office 97 run great on a well-maintained 1 GHz PIII.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I don't use it anymore (I now use Gmail Notifier instead) but for a long time I enjoyed using ePrompter, a taskbar email checker and lightweight email client.
You can set up as many as 8 email addresses, each with its own colour. When you receive an email the taskbar icon turns the colour of the respective email address and displays a number. If more than one email address receives mail the icon alternates colours. Double-clicking the tray icon brings up the small main screen which shows each account and the number of emails. You can open an account, read the email, and reply with the very streamlined and simple client. HTML email isn't supported so it's a great first line of defence against spam.
The program is freeware. It used to be ad-supported but they've since removed the ads.
http://www.eprompter.com/
Ad Muncher is quite possibly the best advertising blocker out there, hands down. I haven't seen an ad in years and it eliminates the need for an anti-spyware application as you'll never come across those annoying smiley banners again. It has a continuously updated filtering system that stops all the pop-ups and ads out there while not breaking websites. For a one-time fee of 25$, it's a steal.
Oh, it doesn't steal any of your precious megahertz or RAM either. It's a well written program. Try the demo out for 30 days, you won't be disappointed.
haven't been able to use it in awhile, but I miss being able to grep individual files for what I want.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Try Foxit Reader, as it is so much faster than the Adobe reader.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
Bloat is simply a lot of extra features you don't use.
Ex: I use EMacs a lot, but only for a few things that are hard to find conviniently together elsewhere. 90% of what it can do, I don't need. For me it's bloat, but for what it does, there's no replacement
Arguably Opera and Konqueror are slimmer than Firefox, but I much prefer what I get with Firefox, so I don't consider it bloat.
OpenOffice - All those features, nobody uses all of them, but it has what most people need. Bloated but useful for everyone.
Bloat is very dependant not just on what is in the software, but what you want, and what you want is different from anyone else. There's probably bloat in any software, it's just variant on the individual using it, otherwise everyone would have their own personal program for every taks, and no one else would use that program.
So... My list
Non-bloat that I like
XMMS
KMail
Firefox
FreeBSD
sh
Hard to call non-bloat, but like it anyway
OpenOffice
KDE
Windows
Trillian
Pidgin
Emacs
Python
GCC
bash
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I sure don't miss downloading a new ~60mB file every 2 weeks for an update for Itunes either.
Wow, where have all the real geeks gone? Most of the replies are for Windows software. If you want bloat free stuff, look at grep, sed, tr, ls, true, false and their companions.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Diablo in ASCII baby!
Peter
In my previous post I forgot to mention nmap for *nix. Of course you could bloat it out by adding front ends etc.. but by itself it is perfect for everything I need.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
favourite bloat-free software not favourite bloatware ! however, this begs the question, if Emacs were re-written in Java, would it be bigger than Vista ?
Lockjaw is much less bloated than Tetris Worlds, Tetris Elements, or Tetris Zone. It's also much less broken if you set it so.
Or the mother of all bloat software?
0 utility, therefore its 100% bloat. And it manages to be quite small while doing it.
maybe you'd be better with true and false
int main(){return 0;}
int main(){return 1;}
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Xvid download: 628K, simple install DivX download: 22.5MB, loads of crapware, nagging reminders to upgrade, etc.
It seems the more any given project or product 'matures' the more it grows and bloats. It doesn't seem to me that many projects take size into account. Even my beloved Linux has failed to pay any heed to bloat... X.org + GNOME or KDE are requiring a lot more power and memory than ever before, for example, and can no longer be easily made suitable for older hardware. (Yes, I know there are distros that focus on maintaining a small size, but those projects themselves are evidence of how difficult it is to maintain functionality within smaller confines.)
I remember coding for OS9/6809... mostly in assembler because I learned that before I learned C... I was always worried about that 64K limit and keeping code tidy. I think we're beyond seeing any such renaissance from ever happening; a cultural shift focusing on compact and efficient code. So I find myself just wishing without hope for some elements of "the good ole days" that have been lost.
Probably one of the best bloat free programs was PrintShop Deluxe for the Mac. The program is the daddy of card design programs (Print Shop for the Apple II is the granddaddy).
It was coded back in the day when people wrote code in assembler so it was fast and until the introduction of the Intel Macs was usable on modern Macintosh's. While some can deride Apples HFS file structure Printshop consisted of 3 files for the program (print shop, documentation and exporter program) plus the graphic libraries. Very clean.
It supported its own internal vector format - but also any of the graphics could be easily exported to Adobe Illustrator, EPS or PICT format with the included exporter program. Another nice thing was the graphic libraries were compiled in single files so instead of having 500 graphic files to deal with you had one large one with 500 graphics, very sensible.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Thank you for mentioning iTunes Player as a bloated piece of ... software. I burn my own CDs to disk and used to really like iTunes but the most recent version kept stuttering and skipping during playback. I guess to Apple all their online store B.S. is more important than actual playback in a music player. It's too bad because it used to be a sleek player. And the podcast subscription ability was very nice.
Although the player I use now is still (probably) bloated compared to other players, it will function fairly well and almost never stutters during playback.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
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.
And anything that ran on it.( Atari Writer anyone? )
Or 1000's of dos apps, like Framework, Symphony.. Hell even Word for DOS wasnt bloated.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
JkDefrag free simple defrag for Windows!
http://www.kessels.com/JkDefrag/
It also has the added bonus of it has no install just run it. If you deside you don't want it? Just delete is and your done!
Because that question doesn't seem to exclude non-commercial, non-graphical applications, or specify particular operating systems, my response might be painfully boring (and just as painfully obvious) to some people, but I would have to say the original Berkeley vi and, of course, c-kermit. Sorry vim people, but with GNU Emacs available for extensibility, I honestly don't know why you would want to bloat something as lean, mean and beautiful as vi.
XTree Gold. Those were the days. Yes it was for Dos.
SmR
I prefer Paintbrush (the Windows 3.1 incarnation) myself: It's the most usable pixel-arranging tool I've found thus far; with intuitive, scalable controls and the capability of moving the cursor around with the arrow keys, which is great for real precise movements.
In an analogy similar to what has happened many times before or since, Paintbrush was licensed to Microsoft by a company called Zsoft, which seemed to conveniently disappear after that. I wonder what happened to them: An updated version of Paintbrush with a few more features would have been a fine thing to have.
It's the only IM client that doesn't annoy me anymore. Amazing little program.
A close second would be uTorrent.
A fully featured GUI SSH client in less than 200 kilobytes (when UPX'd). uTorrent also, of course.
Windows Vista.
Regards,
Steve Ballmer
It will be easier for us to list the apps if you tell us what is your main OS. I assume Windows. Here's some that I use: -Media player classic -VLC -Opera -TreeSize -Auslogics Disk Defrag -HashTab Shell Extension (very handy when comparing file hashes) -Foxit PDF reader ..The rest of the software I use are bloated (by your standard and i don't care much since i have gigs of ram)
His exploit "just works". Apple fanbois everywhere implode in a self-collapsing vortex of cognitive dissonance. by jjack
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...
Gnumeric for me. Had a CSV file t'other day that I needed to make a funky graph out of, it had approx. 2000 data points. Both OpenOffice and KOffice balked at even importing the data, finally managed to make a graph in OpenOffice but the user experience was like wading through treacle.
Then I gave Gnumeric a try, it imported the data immediately, drawing a graph using those data points was instantaneous. It's very impressive, relative to the Free software competition anyway.
Now if only the chaps who made it could be persuaded to make a full Office suite!
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
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.
LIST.COM - it's a bit tricky to find nowadays, but it's probably the greatest pure text file viewer ever. Completely customizable, easy to switch between ascii/hex modes, supports LFN and any sized file, it's only a few kb.
But seriously, my favorite, least bloated applications are those I write for myself using the korn shell.
Mostly they are scripts to automate repetitive administrative tasks.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
foobar2000 is my favorite media player for windows. does one thing very well without any of the pointless eye candy. the installer is 1.6MB and it has some really nice plugins (.ape decoding and last.fm updater).
That can be merely copied to your drive(ala Mac) or even run from a thumb drive. That includes, but not limited to, Seamonkey, Filezilla, Audacity, Miranda, VirtualDub, TightVNC, Exact Audio Copy, Slax (or probably any liveCD). I generally try to avoid anything that actually requires installation, especially anything that places or replaces files anywhere in the system(Windows) directory. I don't care if I have duplicate dll's. I just want the convenience of being able to toss the program into the trash if I no longer need it.
What?
No one knows, they've never found a hard drive that can fit the result...
Errr, wait, they have hard drives that can fit Vista... So, YES!
(Don't flame me for picking on emacs, it's my favorite editor, even if it uses 20MB of memory on my system)
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These devices have very limited RAM and CPU, so anything that can comfortably run there usually are non-bloat. See optware for example. You can also look for packages in openembedded feeds and various wrt feeds.
A boot loader with a CLI that can be installed and run from a 720k floppy. You just got to love it!
Insert Generic Sig Here:
You can run it on older machines, but the efficiency is impressive.
http://www.editpadlite.com/
http://www.crimsoneditor.com/
And of course Opera
http://www.opera.no/
Can't go back to Firefox or IE after using this wonder.
technical writing / development
Konqueror is my favorite "slim" application. "What?", you say, "It requires half of KDE to run!" No. It re-uses half of KDE to run. All that functionality and almost all of it is pulled in from other components.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The odd things about these days of enormous hard disks and memory is that emacs is no longer a large system. I realised this the other day when using it and realising that my browser(firefox) was using an order of magnitude of memory than poor little emacs :)
i like K3B & KTorrent, both are great software, but they do more than i need,
my alternatives are MyBashBurn for burning CDRs and Transmission for torrents...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
TextPad is no-nonsense Windows text editor with tons of functionality. Almost like a user-friendly vi for Windows. It won't replace an dedicated IDE (even though it has some configurable IDE-type functionality), but I use it every day for other tasks. One of the very few programs I've paid the registration fee for.
Atari 800, 400 etc. 8k circa 1979.
Transmission is a very lightweight Bittorrent Client for Linux, Mac OS X, BeOS and BSD. It has minimal CPU, RAM or HD requirements and is very stable. There's even a tiny CLI version if you choose to be ultra-efficient.
Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
I've become a big fan of the GOM media player. Not only is it lightweight, but it's a lot smarter about dealing with codecs than any other player. Even plays Real formats.
I used to like the VLC player, but it seems to have gotten buggy over the years. Locks up, screws up my system so I have to reboot, and always seems to get video colors wrong.
Though it's hardly the most powerful graphics program, Irfanview is the only one I use about 99% of the time. It's simple, as does all the basic graphic file manipulation. Doesn't do serious editing, but it's nice to be able to easily browse a directory, convert formats, or crop a photo, without waiting for GIMP or Photoshop to finish loading.
IZArc probably doesn't rate as "lightweight", since it has an absurd number of features. (Reads every archive format I know of, including RPM and ISO!) But it's a classic of "just works" software design. And what is lightweight is the program's elegant user interface and Windows shell integration.
Ztree, ISOBuster, utorrent, xxcopy, x-setup (not SO bloated, the "copy to" utility from the Windows95 PowerToys (not the later version), textpipe (fantastic utility), and WinRar (though 7zip is better, Rar seems easier to use, but I've not used it in a while)...also many of the Acronis tools are MUCH lighter than their Symantec counterparts (and work better!), and AVG.
Yep, that's the first thing that popped in to my head too. Just wish he'd include lossless crop for Jpegs.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
I use microemacs, which does fit the criteria. Since I have the source, I've been able to tweak it for my preferences, and move it to whatever OS I've needed to use.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
Opera stays useable even with 512 mb of ram and a few hundreds of tabs, althought that is pushing its limits
(you know you are addicted to tabs when...)
Logitech mouse drivers on the other hands are memory monsters
Still looking for a low-memory antivirus that requieres absolutely no user interaction. Grisoft AVG uses little memory, but keeps requiring occasional user interaction for updates, so I hesitate to install it on someone elses machine. Clamwin is worse in that department however.
helloworld
One of the fastest applications out there, and it's small !
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
I prefer PSPad editor, The best I could find. (It may look bloated, but its easily customizable and very light on resources! The only feature its missing is code folding)
Music Player Daemon. Plays music.
As a daemon, it has no interface unless you connect one to it, with several to choose from (commandline, gtk, qt, web, etc). Can be controlled from another computer. Very easy to integrate it with IRC clients and similar.
Really that's IMO how things should be. When you want to control it, you can easily. When you don't it stays out of the way without taking valuable resources with themes, visualization plugins and other junk.
I used to use a great browser call Phoenix, that was light and fast. Then it changed its name and changed its name again. I still use it because its still the best browser and by far my favorite, however I have trouble calling it light and fast these days.
"Luke, I am your node.parent();"
It's not a program in itself, but Lua is wonderfully slim.
I just compiled liblua.a using gcc on cygwin. It was 204392 bytes at -O2, 170764 bytes at -Os.
It mostly still ships on 1 DVD...mostly.
There was an app called Deskpaint, produced by Zedcor back in the mid 90's. It was small (30k or so), fast, and very useful with lots of tools. When I say fast, I mean that it was about twice as fast, on the same computer and doing the same thing, as PaintShop at the time; by now, you could make that 30x as fast. I used that software professionally throughout my career as a study guide prepublisher, and there was very little that I couldn't do with it. Nowadays, the author has some other different freeware out there, but it isn't nearly as good; and it is more bloated (though still pretty light on the bloat).
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
It's a database with full-on ACID transactions in 250K of SQL. I laugh in your face, Oracle.
As far as effective firewalls for Windows go, I've been quite pleased with Comodo Firewall Pro's simplicity and small footprint. It's free, too.
G
Is it just me? It just seems much easier to just buy more RAM and a bigger hard drive. Done.
/...), and want to climb that mountain just because it's there, then fine, but sure seems like spending a hundred bucks on some more RAM, or a bigger hard drive would take far less time (=money) and aggravation.
I mean, I guess if you're a tech geek with time on your hands (oh wait, this is
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
WinMerge may actually be my favorite developer tool. I use it as a replacement to TortoiseDiff that comes with TortoiseSVN. I always liked being able to use ALT+arrow keys to quickly navigate down and selectively merge changes with ease. Being able to compare directories is also a great feature.
http://winmerge.org/index.php
We'll make great pets
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
All I want is a small piece of software that lets me copy like explorer.. but quickly, more reliably (skip errors, resume, etc.) and it lets me schedule when to make backups.. A bonus would be able to see how fast things are copying..
This is for windows xp, btw.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything... in 45 bytes.
Nice and light.
I haven't had a performance reason to upgrade my 700MHz 512MB RAM 9GB HD system. (I actually was pretty happy with the 300MHz before that.)
The spellcheck, the anti phishing features and shit like prefetch that I don't need and can't even remove (I can disable though) just add unnecessarily clutter. Make the spellcheck an officially supported default-on extension. Same for anti phishing, so that I can remove them.
Persinally I tink speelcheck isa bad idea, but now seriously it is almost completely useless: it recognizes very few of the words I commonly use in IT and it is absolutely useless against for example the "loose" vs. "lose" misspelling cases. It is more than an annoyance for me than help.
I realise that my needs might not match the users' needs, but what I listed as top priorities, Firefox only delivers on the security and extensions part. Users in a lot of cases don't know what they need, they can be easily distracted with shiny "cool" stuff, that ends up snowballing in a Katamari way to a big pile of stinking bloat (enjoy the image!).
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Emacs?
Dude... TFA seems to be talking about applications, not operating systems.
[badum-ching]
A Human Right
The last computer I had it on took X seconds to get to a POST beep and Y more seconds to get to a BeOS desktop, and X was greater than Y.
Unfortunately, there wasn't a whole lot to do with it but marvel at its boot time and launch a bunch of QuickTime movies. ArtPaint gave me a glimpse of how fast Photoshop could be, but of course a port never came. (Plus ArtPaint crashed a lot.) The 3D music editing demo app was great but it, too, crashed a lot. I'm glad Apple went with NeXT for the basis of OS X because it's more of a "real" UNIX as compared to the single-user BeOS, but I'd probably just as happy in most ways and happier in some if JLG hadn't been so greedy. Of course, no NeXT means no Steve, and no iMac, iLife, iPod, or iPhone--just freakishly fast beige boxes and probably no market share.
OK, got a little off topic here, but the point remains--if you don't want bloat, check out BeOS. (And get a time machine.) Or QNX--they used to have a demo version that fit a GUI, browser, and web server onto a 1.44 MB floppy.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
STP.exe, a single 209KB file that can play MP3 and WAV files, and CD's, and it understands M3U and PLS playlists. Works in Windows 95-on and minimizes to the System Tray.t ml
http://www.governmentsecurity.org/archive/t3767.h
dr, dirmagic, lview, grep, awk, and zoo
I quit paying attention to software a long time ago (as obvious from my list). Hardware advances made good design "quaint".
Small, yet fully featured. (fnar-fnar)
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
Steve Gibson of SpinRite fame has this page: http://www.grc.com/smgassembly.htm
Of course, he programs directly in assembly in his quest to keep things small and fast.
I love installing FoxIt Reader after installing Acrobat for years. Acrobat downloads some huge bloated reader that takes forever to even begin thinking about installing, let alone the actual installation. FoxIt is far smaller and installs pretty much instantly, and starts up about as fast too.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
You pay a major hit for the basic (dys)functionality, but the bloat comes free!
We need a "+1 -- nice sig" moderation.
GNOME and KDE are bloat, give me fvwm instead.
vim is also bloat, give me nvi or elvis.
Why run Linux 2.6 when Linux 2.4 is much smaller and has the same hardware support?
I bought 4 gigabytes of ram (only $180) to use it, not waste it on fat bloated programs.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
aria2 is a lovely light weight command line BitTorrent/Metalink downloader.
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.
utorrent of course, they pack a ton into 214kb
My Windows tools are:
SIW: a freeware computer inventory tool. It is only one executable, and doesn't need to be installed on the PC. With it I can get the MS activation keys, to make sure that we aren't exceeding our action pack subscription. While there are other tools that let you do similar things, SIW is one of the best tool boxes you can carry on a USB drive, all by itself.
I also use Putty (I prefer the portable version, as it doesn't need to be installed, and doesn't leave anything in the registry), and good old Notepad for doing text edits.
It's 190k and provides all that I need in a programming editor. I've been using it for about 13 years and not once has it crashed or done anything to lose my work.
on the older classic OS, I always liked iCab browser and Soundjam MP3 player. Small, worked very well, I still use them on the odd occasion I have to use my old powerbook.
On linux, the mini OS distros,damn small, puppy, slax, austrumi, etc. proving you can have a decent functional desktop with a variety of useful applications in only 50 megs of space. You don't need hundreds of megs on a CD or an entire DVD with gigs of stuff, most of which most normal users will never use anyway. Browser, chat, email, media player, some sort of text editor, done.
Windows, no idea, haven't used it since 98se, which could run on some pretty marginally specced machines.
I always combine PuTTY with PSHotLaunch, and put my most commonly-used connections on a single hotkey each (as well as add a few other hotkeys). Very nice launchpad app -- not sure if it supports running off a thumb drive though.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
I like Process Explorer as a replacement for taskmanager. It's almost the opposite of what this thread is about, it looks like a bloated taskmanager, but it really does manage to show you simple process info without going crazy. Comes without an installer (yeah!).
Best feature, right click a process and pick "Search Online".
Bloat-Free? there'r many the word 'bloat' instantly reminds me Vista...
just wonder why there are so many anonymous cowards in this world....
I'd say my favourite low-bloat software would be Fluxbox, the greatest speedy window manager ever made! :D
Don't get too anal retentive over bloated vs. slim sofware because it's an unusual preference depending on the circumstance. If you're running desktop software (only affecting yourself) run as much bloat as you like (or don't run as much as you dislike) -- just throw some more cheap RAM or HDD space at if you needed. You can be happy running your select slimming desktop software to the degree that the rest of the world progresses around you and leaves you in the dust, or you can take a balanced approach.
The guy who establishes unbloated software as priority #1 above any other software factors is unrealistically skewed.
I don't care, I'll run Winamp + Windows Media + Foobar whatever all at the same time on my desktop at times if the various media files want to launch them.
However if you're running a server you might choose slimming software to reduce resource usage because it affects multiple users and is more costly to maintain as a result. This is where hypersensitivity to bloatware makes more sense.
Far more efficient than fileman was - you could tag files and perform any operation on a tagged set at a later time.
Ran in DOS 5 all the way up to 6.2x... Until I started using drvspace/doublespace and had less need to delete parts of the OS I didnt use and apps I installed and didnt need (like WinG... and dashboard... and afterdark... and and and etc)
MC / NC are close, but still no cigar... they're not GOLD!
Matt
I love this Antivirus package, especially compared to the bloated mess that is Norton Antivirus. NOD32 is relatively small, VERY FAST, consumes very little resources. I usually tell people who have Norton installed it's worse for their computer then any virus ever could be. I usually uninstall it and put on NOD32 if they are willing to pay for a subscription, or AVG for the freebie folks.
Textpad always seemed good, but it's not free software, and it had nag screens, IIRC.
On Windows I really like SciTE for text editing. I keep a copy on my flash drive. It's free, it's like a meg and a half, it's configurable, and it does syntax highlighting for a ton of languages.
Most people will need to switch it to use monospaced fonts by default, but otherwise it's pretty nice.
I wrote it so I'm biased, but Remind is the smallest (about 120kB) but by far the most flexible personal calendar tool I've seen.
cat
ls is too bloated though.
My poetry site welcomes the unusual.
It's missing a few features of "modern" spreadsheets, but at 26.9 Kbytes (for the version that runs in a DOS command prompt), there probably isn't anything smaller.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It is a Windows defrag program. The download is about 300KB and it works great! They also have a background defrager called BuzzSaw that is also about 300KB
http://www.dirms.com/
--
still use it from time to time on my slackware box running under FreeDos/DOSEMU.
http://www.whuddafug.com
My favorite is Firefox with as many useless add-ons as possible....oh wait you said bloat-FREE never mind.
Most cheap / free video editors have lots of what you don't need, and miss features which I go to a higher end package for. AVI Edit strikes a great balance. The workflow is straight forward, but not always completely intuitive. It is essentially file based.
It is great for taking a sequence of still frames (ie stop motion animation done with a digital camera.. kids love that!)
It is also good for format work, and as a general video swiss army knife. AVI Edit Homepage - Thank you Alexander Milukov!!
I put it on every machine I work on.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
So many mentioned putty but no one winscp? It's the best if you need scp/sftp on Windows.
BTW, does someone know a good graphical opensource/freeware norton commander clone? (something like SpeedCommander/Total Commander but freeware)
I learned of jwm from Puppy Linux. Pretty light on features (like, no way to edit the menus from the GUI), but simple, light, and it looks and acts much like Windows.
For Linux distros that aren't crippled for the sake of minimalism, I've been using Zenwalk Linux. Zenwalk is one of the mainstream distros that still fits on one CD, and keeps the cheating (downloading of crucial features after supposedly finishing an install) to a minimum. Vector Linux is supposed to be light, but it takes 2G when installed-- too much for an old laptop. Zenwalk is lighter. I looked at KateOS briefly. They have a page on why Kate is better than Vector, but didn't have some things I was looking for, so didn't try it. And I had been using Slackware (that's where I put jwm), but have given up on it.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I love a piece of abandonware for use while programming. I don't like the bloat and confusion of normal IDE, so I started using notepad and gcc. I hated that notepad was so basic it was hard to code with, so I found this tiny, fast, programming aware version of notepad. It can do important tasks such as line numbering, syntax highlighting, and indentation fixing. http://student.acu.edu/~jhg03a/jfe.exe
Quintessential Player is a GREAT little music player. It's got skins, it's got fanciness, but at the end of the day it's small (2.2MB download) and fast--on my ancient laptop (P2-233) I started using it because it was the only thing that would play audio without skipping and with less than 100% CPU. (In fact, it normally consumed about 20% CPU.)
There's also a media player with a comprehensive library and all of the bells and whistles in development. Bigger, but still fast and light to run.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Apps that use little hard disk space or have a small memory footprint is fine and all, but does it really matter? Sure this is great for older systems, but I have a fairly new system so that these criteria are not an issue. I haven't used any of the swap space ever. I think usability is much more important than how much ram it uses.
PDF Creator is great for making your own PDFs. It's not terribly large (installs as a Windows printer) and is a ton cheaper than Acrobat Standard or Pro.
This space for rent.
Small, does everything... bloats depending on your needs :)
..usually. As another poster..posted, I dont mind software that makes *wise* use of resources. That said, as a Software QA dude (and Power user for far longer) I have noticed that the rapid expansion of cheap hardware resources have made developers and the programs created very lazy. Hard drives are littered with unnecessary files, memory efficiency is unheard of, etc. Every program acts like it is the only app being run. Most programs I encounter are like bad roommates. They consume resources they don't need or own (like a roommate drinking your last beer), they collide with other apps (like bad roommate arguing with your visitors and friends) and they dont clean up after themselves unless ordered to at gun-point (like...well yeah you get the idea) IMO, there would be far better quality in applications if devs had to make them work within a much smaller resource set *before* they were permitted to expand and use more resources. But then I wouldnt have so much fun detailing how a developers app/feature is "teh suck"
Apple cant program. That is what i get from iTunes. IF anything would inspire me to not buy a mac, it would be iTunes on the PC. There isnt a 64bit native version, and the 36bit version is so ridiculously slow that i cant imagine how any pc before a QX6700 could run the dam thing :)
Sometimes i wonder how the hell i could run 3dsmax on 16megs of ram in NT351 years ago. It cant for the life of me see how computing has improved when all i see is applications getting fatter and slower. Are CPUs really getting faster? hehe
That little Calculator ap. A cousin of mine, Craig Brockschmidt, wrote it and pretty much retired. His name dropped from the "About..." menu ca. Win3.1, but I can't tell that it's otherwise changed since then.
The pain was excruciating and the scarring is likely permanent, but that just means it's working.
truecrypt, daemon-tools, md5summer, KMP media player (it's bloated with features that seemingly need no resources), RealVNC
They're using their grammar skills there.
I never thought the day would come but my vote goes to emacs.
I've been using it for over 20 years, from back in the day when it was considered enormously bloated. These days it has a tiny footprint by comparison. Mine's running in 10MB just now and I use it as file editor, IDE for a dozen languages, mail reader, browser, calendar, diary, etc.
That's a lot of bang for your megabyte.
100 meg of disk space costs a few pennies. Just use the application that gets the job done, and don't worry about conserving a resource that is almost free.
For those on the Mac I find that Graphic Converter does a nice job on small photo-edits. Its surprisingly powerful for a little program.
No kidding.
Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping. Well, it's still just eight megs, which is, for better or worse, quite lean nowadays.
Calendar.com -- 896 bytes, displays the calendar for any month.
C:\Bin>dir calendar.com
Volume in drive C is XPPro
Volume Serial Number is 5851-2646
Directory of C:\Bin
10/13/2006 11:46 PM 896 Calendar.com
1 File(s) 896 bytes
0 Dir(s) 23,780,888,576 bytes free
C:\Bin>calendar
September 2007
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30
C:\Bin>calendar nov 1963
November 1963
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
C:\Bin>
I love the hell out of that page ... but speaking of pages, it's too bad that anything you load is going to take at least two pages (at 4K each) anyway. Maybe one, if you can convince it to all run in one section. So all that effort to create a 45-byte file, which will still require the same 8K that the original C file would take up.
Of course that wasn't really the point.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
You're comparing iTunes to Winamp and Foobar. You also compare WMP to VLC and MPC. iTunes is the primary interface for an iPod/iPhone. WinAmp is DESIGNED to be a media player. Windows Media Player not bloated? The install package is pretty hefty, VLC is both portable and includes all of the codecs you need. MPC has the same handicap of requiring the DLLs to be installed on the host machine as well. VLC can only be compared to MPC and WMP if you think of it in terms of WMP+Codecs and MPC+Codecs.
I downloaded and installed Squid the other day on my home server. I had done this once before in the past, but I had completely forgotten how tiny it is.
Then there's SQLite. It's a surprisingly powerful and astonishingly fast SQL server. Not enterprise grade, mind you (it lacks any real security and can't handle data being updated while there is an open cursor on it), but great for a lot of simple tasks.
If you program in Perl, the DBD::SQLite module actually contains the entire SQLite engine. No server is needed (there is no daemon). It stores the entire database in one file, which makes for easy replication, archiving and compression.
www.wavefront-av.com
"Of course, on the system *I* administrate, vi is symlinked to ed.
Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog
message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K;
and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!"
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
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.
grep sed and cut (awk is too bloated)
P.S. Any misspellings or faults of grammar you think you detect are mearly transmition errors, and probably your fault a
In addition, Acrobat leaves AcroRead32 processes hanging around, especially when used as a browser plugin.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
PICO!
For one thing, it's the fastest way to end a vi vs emacs argument. I've never seen two warring parties unite against an aspiring geek so fast.
Some people complain of bloat as what they think are useless features. Others think of bloat in terms of memory footprint, disk usage, or performance and their priority often depends on the task ahead.
One example I can think of is Opera VS Firefox. If you read the comments around any Opera story around here, you'll notice how some FF fans will say that Opera is bloated despite its speed and smaller footprint. At the same time, those who use Opera will complain about FF's memory leaks and its bugging down with huge pages.
Among the examples cited by the story's submitter, I prefer Media Player Classic because it's faster while providing better image quality. There's also Notepad++ as an alternative PHP/ASP.net/HTML editor and XnView for image management and conversion. I also like Amarok and WinAmp. Although they're not light applications, I prefer them over iTunes.
I came across my favorite piece of bloat-free software while learning about Linux's ELF file format. It's only 45 bytes, and quite educational. :-)
DDL
Workbench 1.2 - 720k
Website Hosting
An example to you all...
A program I wrote (a long time ago) when I was having unreadable-screen problems when debugging VESA-mode DOS apps, on win9x.
No bloat here!
(Although I daresay the mov al and mov ahs could be coalesced into one instruction (mov ax) ).
If only all software could be this compact...
B400 mov ah,00
B003 mov al,03
CD10 int 10
B44C mov ah,4C
B000 mov al,00
CD21 int 21
There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face - Ben Williams
If anything, iTunes is stripped down. I don't get it. It's not like it has three rows of MS Office toolbars.
And why is Ask Slashdot always such goofball stuff?
When I was windows-bound, this was my favorite emailer. Can't get burnt with text-only.
while [[ true ]]; do export CTR=0; for i in *; do if [[ "$(expr $RANDOM % $(ls -1 * | wc -l))" -eq "$CTR" ]]; then mplayer "$i"; fi; export CTR=$(expr $CTR + 1); done; done
ResidntGeek
Here's my list: OpenOffice, e-Sword, Firefox, Google Desktop, TightVNC, Thunderbird, Picasa, AVG Anti-Virus, GIMP, IrfanView, VLC Media Player, FileZilla, 7zip
Not bloated? Christ, that list makes Rosie Odonnell look anorexic!
if so, check Lua. the whole language fits in your CPU cache, and thanks to it's squeaky-clean language design, the reference is really small too. Also, according to all shootouts, it has the fastest non-JIT VM (there's also a pretty good LuaJIT too, but it's (still) not as fast as Java's)
i'm serious, not even Scheme comes close to Lua's cristalline simplicity and efficiency
-Kz-
I prefer software that takes as little hard drive space and RAM as possible.
I'm not really sure what this means. Do you prefer as little hard drive and RAM use as possible because you're running your life on a hacked Apple IIe? Or do you prefer hard drive and RAM efficiency because you use a honkin' desktop machine but like to keep a dozen apps open and working at once? Or is it really just an aesthetic preference, a form of minimalism ("I wear a loincloth, but I draw the line there. Sandals are for whimps.")?
Personally I'm less interested in RAM or hard drive use per se, and much more concerned with operational efficiency. At the human interaction level, does an app let me do what I need to do easily and intuitively, without getting in my way? Does it force me to learn its intricacies, which are then not transferrable to other apps? Or does it anticipate my needs in a non-intrusive way? To me the most efficient apps are the ones where I think, "Hmm.. I wonder if it does *this*?" Sure enough, it does.
My preference is for small, sharp apps that only do a few things, but do them well. They execute quickly, are a pleasure to work in (without calling attention to themselves), and are intuitive to use.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Snowbird at 22KB
RGdot.com
The original awk cannot parse fixed-field data, which makes it nearly useless outside of academia (where inputs can be controlled, and profits are not an issue).
GNU awk, as maintained and extended by Arnold Robbins (author of Unix in a Nutshell, etc.) not only handles fixed fields reasonably elegantly, it also has socket I/O and numeric base manipulation functions. It's like a smaller, faster perl with a cleaner syntax - so clean almost anybody can learn it in two weeks or less (2 days for an expert programmer).
The only major thing wrong with it is the same thing that's wrong with all awks - it uses the space character as the string concatenation operator, which is a really stupid idea.
sylpheed is a cross-platform email client that is lighter-weight and more stable than thunderbird.
http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/
When I am working in Windows, I usually have on instance of Notepad and one of Paint opened. They are perfect as "buffers" for text and graphics. Althought their capacities are not as good it is quite handy to make [WIN]+R "pbrush" or "notepad" to quickly paste some kind of note or graphic of interest.
On Linux, I have been using "KolourPaint" which is quite similar to pbrush but has some other extra features, unfortunately not all of them work fine (for example zooming out or in of an image makes the image render wrongly) and the gnome text editor takes *ages* to start compared to notepad...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
for Music I really like MusikCube. It's somewhat like itunes, but much lighter. It has great support for naming and tagging in large batches, and has dynamic playlists. Basically a very flexible SQL query, and you can basically use any criteria, from a very large list of stuff it keeps. They have some great examples.
I also like XMplay as a pretty basic, and really lite MP3 player.
I still use TANGO/DOS. I can fit everything that I need on a 5.25" floppy. It runs fast, has pull down menus (not all fluffy like windoze), it always finds all of the errors and makes perfect PCBs.
I have also used PCAD and OrCAD, both windoze versions, and am always dissatified with the user interface, too many menus to pull down. They try to do too much for you. I can see it in a large company, but for a 1-man shop it's way too much overhead.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
Who really cares about reducing "bloat" any more? There was a time when hard disk space was at a premium (Stacker, anyone?), but these days, I've got more disk space than I know what to do with. And 90% of what I do have there is data: pictures, music, etc. Reducing the size of the applications would result in a barely noticeable change.
I can still sort of see the argument with respect to memory, particularly if you're running an older machine... but for a relatively new one, you've got plenty of RAM in there for almost anything. Even if you're running an older rig, just buy more damn memory!
Enlightenment 17 is the only modern desktop solution I know of that packs a ton of bling without even a trace of bloat. Definitely my favorite bloat-free software.
main() { write(1, "hello, world", 12); }
Even though I'm (at least mostly) joking, the difference is real, and at one time would have given serious consideration to doing things this way in real code. In reality, you've shown exactly how a lot of bloat really happens. Much of it stems from people using large, general-purpose libraries where they didn't really need them. In some cases (including this one) they didn't really even gain much from the library. The C stdio library provides buffering that can help speed when/if it reduces the number of times your program calls the OS write routine. In this case, the code calls write exactly once either way, so it's gained you nothing, but cost you extra memory usage and data copying, as well as making your program quite a bit larger.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
WinImages' EXE is about 4.6 megs. Feature-wise, it is comparable to Photoshop most ways, with some different approaches here and there. Considerably more powerful than the current release of Gimp. It loads and executes essentially immediately on any modern machine (say a GHz or better), even first time after a system reboot (doesn't depend on OS caching for startup speed.)
It will use 250 megs if that's how much memory is required to hold an image (in four 62.5 meg allocations - R, G, B and A.) If there isn't enough memory to do that, it depends upon the OS to handle the virtualization of the image data. All images are treated as 32-bit for processing purposes. All operators (filters, etc) directly approach the image buffers in memory for maximum speed. Users are definitely better off having enough memory.
WinImages is written in C, intentionally designed to use as few external functions (OS, DLL or otherwise) as possible as initially installed.
The footprint can be enlarged by adding plug ins, scripts, and various data files such as particle systems, ray trace scenes, palettes, brushes, curves, transitions, timelines, operator presets, tool caddies and the usual host of other ancillary files. The actual weight of image files typically dwarfs WinImages' resource usage almost no matter what you do, and none of the above slows the software down in any appreciable manner.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
office suite:
editing: vim, sc
viewing: cat, catdoc, catppt, xls2csv, xpdf
internet stuff:
www: elinks, dillo
ftp: elinks, lftp
email: mutt
irc: ii or maybe irssi
(centericq eating up 6 megs of memory seems to bloated for this list)
window manager: wmii
file managment:
zsh, splitvt, screen
seejpeg and qiv for image viewing
convert from imagemagick does everything I need from an image editor
alock as "screensaver" http://darkshed.net/files/c_cpp/alock/
aterm for terminal emulation in X
sox for audio stuff
and last but not least (at almost 1 Mb) microperl when I need to do some not-so-fancy perl-kung-fu
A complete DAW, with various plugins, in an installer of about 2.5 megabytes. This is not limited-use or cheap-ass software, either. The sound is phenomenal, and the plugins are useful. How do they do it? No legacy code. A complete start-over from scratch.
http://www.reaper.fm/
-----
"You spilled my egg... I needed that egg."
I was about to say that it takes even more space on Plucker,but then I realized that we were talking about different things.
I get Plucker to spider the most recent 30 articles (all the direct links from http://slashdot.org/search.pl? ). Without graphics, the first-order spidering, when harvested and compressed, becomes a 1MB file for my Palm Treo.
But you're talking about just the front page of Slashdot. Looks like that CSS is pretty hefty. If you happen to want to compress it, looks like Plucker might be an option.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
My favorite non-bloated apps are Gnumeric (spreadsheet), orpie (awesome RPN calculator), and Liferea (feed reader). Also GAIM/Pidgin, which in my opinion has done an amazing job of maintaining and improving a simple interface while becoming very versatile in terms of the protocols that it supports.
:-)
On an aside... anyone remember how Firefox was originally supposed to be a NON-bloated browser? Maybe it still is, in comparison to IE, but I load it down with so many extensions and plugins and gizmos that it doesn't seem that way anymore
My bicyles
Yeah, I use textpad all the time. I haven't found anything better for doing multi-file text replacements.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
Damn that game was fun and it ran on an Apple II loaded from a floppy!
David W. Hogg -- assoc prof, NYU Physics
Last week I resurrected an IBM Thinkpad (~1Ghz, munged 18G HD, 1600x1200x32, broken DVD and dead net port) using Damn Small Linux, booting from floppy and running off a USB key.
It's a fine system. Shoehorning everything to be able to run on a 16MB 486DX system makes a system with plenty of resources run fast.
I'm considering switching from the bloated hulk that is Fedora, which I have to use at work.
sigs, as if you care.
Does the job. Still fits on a floppy easily.... found here!
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Dennis Posey's sailing simulators require about 2MB hard drive space. With simple graphics, they run on old computers. There is nothing missing from these programs that would be worth the pain of making them bigger. They were obviously developed for some early Wndows version and not allowed to bloat since then, even though there are new tweaks that come out every year.
poseysail.com
Mike.
Long Live Cleveland Freenet (bl899)
For Windows:
Irfanview - The best free image editor/viewer full stop
EditPlus - A really fast, versatile, and small text editor
ArtGem - Virtually unheard of, but extremely fast. Rivals and even surpasses GIMP.
Opera - Not perfect, but faster and less bloated than Firefox and IE
Deepburner - least bloated CD burning program I found which actually works.
Syncback - Just found this recently. By far the best backup prog especially for its price.
Mediaplayer, and MirandaIM as already said
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Umm... Vista.
scite is my editor of choice for c because it is very light and gets the job done well. - Real men just grep /dev/urandom for chars and pipe them to a text file.
I tried several RSS aggregators (RSS Bandit, SharpReader) and they were all slow and dificult to work with, but FeedReader is great.
Hah!! Well, I'm not buying any software without DTT.*
*Digital Turnip Twaddling
(The problem with the iPhone is not that it was version 1.0. The problem is that Steve Jobs is version 0.9 Beta, after all these years.)
Requirement for compiling:
gcc
ncurses development library version 4 (should work on newer version)
glibc 2.1 and above
A fast computer (because libmpeg3 is a high quality decoder)
8MB RAM
http://lienmp3.sourceforge.net/
The best non-bloat app ever!
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
My personal favorite was Peter Jennings Microchess, written in 1976 for a computer called the Kim-1.
http://www.computerhistory.org/chess/main.php?sec= thm-42f15c9b2be73&sel=thm-42f15cab2be73
Top this: this is a program that plays chess. It does not play it well, but it does accept input and makes a legal move in response. How long is the program?
838 bytes.
Yes, bytes, no k or M prefix.
You can see the entire hex listing here:
http://archive.computerhistory.org/projects/chess/ related_materials/text/4-1.MicroChess_%20Manual_fo r_6502.Micro-Ware/MicroChessManual.PETER_JENNINGS. 062303071.sm.pdf
Check page 24/41.
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html
It uses a CLI (it's got a GUI too but who needs that pffft) and it keeps its codecs locally rather than using system ones. This might not be a plus in all cases, but it sure makes it portable and easy to set up (after a system reinstall I don't have to worry about reinstalling codecs).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Compare an Exchange installation at ~500MB (and some fairly considerable resource requirements) to CommuniGate Pro, which uses around ~30MB and is very light weight to run as well, despite its extensive list of features.
XeoMage
win32pad is the best free, lightweight (32K exe) notepad replacement I've ever found. It is basically a wrapper around the MS RichEdit control so you get Unicode support, no 64K limit, and the added bonus of clickable hyperlinks in your files.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I read through a number of posts describing well-coded applications, many running under Unix for many years, others being Os kernals that aren't considered "modern" today, based on what we expect of operating systems today.
For years I have used an environment that forces many creative programmers to "write tight." It's the Palm OS, currently being referred to as Garnet. Applications have to be small and run in the RAM they occupy (in storage). they can only access small amounts of free RAM. There are something like 20,000 applications written for Palm-compatible devices and they tend to work very well with very little "bloat."
I have run into programmers who are regularly churning out applications for the Palm OS devices because they say they have fun while writing the applications, applications are pretty simple to write and the results are very pleasing. One person told me that it generally takes about a weekend to flesh out a fairly easy game.
When you compare the Palm OS devices to the Windows Mobile devices, the Palm devices need less memory and work simpler and better.
When the environment demands simplicity, you get really useful results.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
RiscOS On X (ROX)
This gem has been around for awhile. It's somewhat "minimalistic": gtk, C, maybe libxml. No heavy component interface, large GNOME dependencies, or similar. It's blazing fast on both my desktop and my PDA. It's also blazing fast to use...faster than the commandline alone. Once you've assigned keys to its standard functions, you can navigate directories by clicking...or by hitting '/' and shell-style tab completion. You can select files by globs, regexps, or more complicated patterns, also at the press of a key. Then you can hit '!' and run a command on your selection. Drag and drop is prevalent and intuitive, but not forced or required. The mass rename dialog is awesome, and regexp-based, along with manual editing. Did I mention it was really fast? And when all the builtin functions aren't sufficient, you can hit 'x' and pop up a (user-specified) terminal in the cwd. Thus it works alongside the shell you love, instead of replacing it.
After all these years, there's still nothing as usable or functional... or fast.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I switched from CA's eTrust to Nod32 on 600 computers. It was as if I'd given them a much faster processor and faster hard drives. The speed difference was amazing. eTrust now uses many 3rd party programs. It uses Apache Tomcat for the GUI which is slow the way they did it. Any time a Secunia warning came out for any of the 3rd party software they used, there was typically a huge eTrust update a week later.
Nod has a small foot print and is easy to manage. It doesn't have as nice of an admin interface, however I find myself spending 1/20th the time administrating Nod as I did with eTrust.
Nod has anti spyware, anti rootkit, smtp/pop3/http scanning, etc in a single client product. eTrust had only antispyware/antivirus and that was in three products (Pest Patrol, Inoculan, and Vet.)
My vote is for Nod32. I also enjoy Pidgin, Ad-Aware, Truecrypt, PGP, HDTune, Thunderbird, Firefox, UltraVNC and IrfanView.
Hats off to NSIS for being a full-blown installer with some 40 KB overhead. I worship its having delivered me from the clutches of the evil InstallShield (remember when apps were 50KB and the setup 2 MB?) Justin Frankel is a genius.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Let's compare my `top`:
PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
1030 vim 0.0% 0:00.15 1 14 19 816K 1.15M 2.26M 27.7
993 Xcode 0.0% 0:02.52 1 71 208 5.14M 7.75M 10.3M 145M
992 TextMate 0.0% 0:00.78 1 64 83 2.31M 3.79M 5.74M 121M
983 emacs 0.0% 0:00.18 1 15 28 1.18M 3.64M 3.56M 56.0M
Not very surprising. Vim comes in first in resource economy. Emacs second. TextMate third. Xcode fourth. But the difference between emacs and TextMate is negligible. Xcode is rather large in comparison, but I wouldn't call it a monstrosity. (I realize you didn't call it one -- it's the only "full featured" IDE I have installed on this box)
I'll stick to TextMate unless I'm building Cocoa applications or logged in remotely.
After all, I am strangely colored.
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.
This is a good question but it is hard to sift through all of the replies looking for recommendations. It would be very helpful if the person orignally posting the query would post a follow-up summary of the responses, perhaps with an indication of the frequency of each suggestion. Thanks, Bill
Without bloat how could I justify new hardware to the wife?
Acceptable:
"Well honey, my old computer doesn't meet the requirements of Office 2007 so I'm going to have to upgrade..."
Unacceptable:
"Well honey, my old computer doesn't meet the requirements of Bioshock so I'm going to have to upgrade..."
It's amazing how large of a video card my "Office 2007" machine needed.
ROX Filer
It's freaking fast, responsive, intuitive (similar to the Mac OS Finder), and hackable.
It's so fast, I've used it to replace some menus I used to use, in some ways.
http://www.busybox.net/
I try and use minimalist software whenever possible. You can't beat the start up times and simplicity. Obviously lighter software has fewer features, so that's why you need to keep more bloated pieces of crap around in case you need them. For instance: 1) Browser. Usually for browsing I use elinks. It's an awesome console text browser. It has tabs, bookmarks, table and frame support, and very importantly, editing text boxes in an external editor (this post is being typed in ViM). It can browse most websites with ease. Starts up pretty much instantaneously and even with several tabs, barely uses more than 4MB of memory, compared with 100+MB for firefox. However, there are websites which I need other browsers for. If I need to view images, I can use the links browser with image support. But usually I use firefox for more complicated things. My University website is completely inoperable in elinks. For bloated websites, I need a bloated browser. 2) Music player. Easy, XMMS. I tried Audacious (an updated GTK2 client), but the sound quality wasn't as good. XMMS with thunar (custom action to enqueue in XMMS) makes a perfect music manager. I have a separate workspace with XMMS and thunar open to manage and listen to music. No frills, and it works. XMMS also is very memory efficient (4MB about). 3) Text Editor. ViM for many tasks. However, sometimes when editing large amounts of LaTeX files I use the Cream scripts or Gedit with the LaTeX plugin. Just a side note, ViM has a latex suite that makes it very easy to edit LaTeX files. Often lightweight software can be extended by scripting or plugins to add just the features you want, instead of using a heavy bloated piece of crap. 4) Checking email. Unfortunately I've yet to find something lightweight. I use sylpheed claws that uses about 20MB, which isn't bad at all, but it's more in the medium category. I tried various text based clients and whatnot, but every single client I've tried either a) requires a fetchmail/getmail like installation or b) has horrible documentation and it's too frustrating to set up. I prefer an email app, but Gmail is perfectly usable in elinks for those who don't mind Gmail's setup. You can use ViM for your Gmail this way. 5) Window Manager. Fluxbox. When I moved to Linux last year I used GNOME. Believe me, there is nothing in GNOME that you can get in Fluxbox with a little customization...well maybe that's not entirely true but it's coming close. Here's a huge tip for Ubuntu users. Get the alternate installation CD, and install a command line only system. Then install fluxbox and GTK, and whatever else you use. This will avoid the installation of lots of useless services and make your startup time really fast. Mine went from 1min to 30 seconds, and shutdown time is 12 seconds now.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
http://lincgeek.org/bashpodder/
Replace iTunes with a shell script...
I'll second that. I used to use WS-FTP, but switched to Filezilla because it's free (and it allows you to throttle your uploads/downloads).
Gotta say it. As far as quality : resource consumption ratios are concerned, this game tops all. It's probably because it does not require a 3D card, and must run at 640x480 resolution. It is also pretty well coded I think, because my friend used to run it on a 486 running Windows 95. Yes, 486. Yes, it was painful, but after the game finally loaded, it ran quite smoothly! And it's still a great, playable game, almost 10 years later.
It only runs in Mac Classic, but at 400k, the web browser Wannabe is a very cool app. Extremely fast at loading pages. It displays only text, converting images (ads, etc.) to urls or saving them to disk. I really wish the author would open-source it for a port to OS X and other systems.
Hands down
For my PortableApps usb key, it would have to be Putty for a tool or Q10 for a text editor.
Putty is simply irreplaceable when I'm stuck on Windows.
Q10 is just a light, quick, beautiful, whimsical text editor. I only wish it worked under Linux, but it does default to Unix line breaks, so it has that going for it.
Otherwise, I'd have to go with Yakuake or Katapult.
Yakuake is a Quake style drop down terminal for KDE.
Katapult is a launcher that has almost completely replaced the kde menu for me.
The television will not be revolutionized.
I have found many good/small bloat free apps here .... www.tinyapps.org
Duke Nuke'em Forever.
oh...
wait...
You can have my cynical agnosticism when you pry it from my cold, dead logic.
Edit Pad Lite http://editpadlite.com/
It has amazing find/replace capabilities that I haven't seen in other text apps. Edit Pad Lite is free (the download is a bit hidden at that URL) and Pro costs money but has regexp, syntax, etc.
It's the only Windows app I really miss in Linux.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
How many programs for Windows have existed almost unchanged for as long as Windows has existed.
The kernel. *rimshot*
Thanks, I'll be here all week. Try the veal.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Blender
Measured in features compared to other programms of the same type, Blender is easyly the most bloat-free software ever. Version 2.0 fit on two 3.5" HD Disks and had an incredible featureset. The GUI uses OpenGL and is blazingly fast compared to other 3D progamms. It has gotten larger (ca. 10MB to download) but still beats others hands down.
Emacs
Once the most bloated piece of software in existance, Emacs now is the leanest Work enviroment available with the most power. After 10 years I've finally started to learn Emacs and it's all I expected it to be. Usage and control is far-out bizar at some points (marking a section takes several steps that are so counter intuitive it's unbelievable) but the power and available featureset is impressive.
Fluxbox
My favorite non-bloat Window Manager on X. Fast, neat and unique features, looks good. My prime choice for non-KDE/Gnome setups.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
less is a good program. I also happen to like ls, cd, grep, and the occasional pwd.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
Yes, indeed, Window Maker. I've been using it since 200. It is small, powerful, reliable, user-friendly, Free, ergonomic.
It really is painful to use kwm (KDE) and metacity (GNOME) in comparison. Before Window Maker I was an avid AfterStep fan, but at some point it became very buggy, bloated and full of cheesy eye-candy.
In my new job I have to use MS windows (2k3) which is absolutely dreadful, but I also get to use a RedHat box running GNOME. It's not as bad as Windows, but it's still no banana.
Stick Men
My list on linux:
I often find it's quicker and easier to use command-line tools rather than GUIs:
Can anyone suggest a really lightweight WYSIWYG wordprocessor for Linux, preferably one that doesn't make bloated files? I'd also like an alternative to kaddressbook that wouldn't take 9 seconds to start up on my 2.2 GHz dual-core x64.
Find free books.
Putty uTorrent AudioGrabber (though the sounds and decorations are a bit much) ChatZilla (IRC with no fuss) wget nmap TextPad dillo mpg123
A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a battle of wills
I have some issues running synergy on a machine with more than 1 core/cpu. Sure would be nice if it was tuned & recompiled for the modern era. Otherwise I happen to agree on that particular app, I use it daily (even with the copy buffer desynch issue and the occasional other bugs).
I never expected to like Mail on the Mac, but it's actually very good at dealing with...mail. I have one glitchy issue with message duplication using UW-IMAP, but as far as fast searching of my mail and speed searching on large folders, it beats the hell out of Outlook + Exchange (because it stores a local copy of my remote IMAP folders). I like the idea of having Calendaring and Contacts split out, primarily because I never use either. I am a convert from Evolution on SuSE, so I spent a while trying to get that to run well, and ended up using Mail.app, and being happy with it.
I like music
I'm a huge fan of Avast, ripped Norton or Mcafee off computers that were running very slowly, taking 5 minutes to boot up etc... put on avast, and not only is it free for home, but it brought the computers right up to where they should be for speed and booting up and logging in under a minute.
i recommend it to everyone, especially people that complain about paying for their computer stuff
DE : Openbox FTP: "ftp" Download Manager: wget IRC: irssi MediaPlayer: uPlayer Backup OS: tty Linux (4mb)
I don't have any mod points today, but dammit I'm glad someone doesn't have their head wedged directly up their ass on this issue.
Inefficient, bloated software is inefficient and bloated regardless of what hardware it is running on; and 'inefficient' and 'bloated' are not admirable traits.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
Foxit PDF reader. So much less bloat than Adobe's PDF reader.
FoxIt PDF reader: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/
7-zip file archiver: http://www.7-zip.org/
Web browsing: Links
E-mail client: Yarn or Pine
USENET client: Yarn or slrn
FTP Client: NFTP or Midnight Commander
Shoutcast/MP3 player: Z!
Filemanager: ZTree Bold, FileJet, or Midnight Commander
Text editing: FTE, pico, or Cooledit/mcedit
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Select All (Ctrl+A), drag picture around so that the top left corner of the canvas touches the top left corner of the region you would like to crop; resize canvas from the bottom right corner to the bottom right corner of your region; save (NOT AS JPEG KTHNX).
"If a piece of software take so long to load that I get bored and kill it before it loads then it is bloated..."
.... VLC anyone ..."
again, that is a wrong conclusion. You do not know if it is bloated. All you know is that it is poorly designed. not the same thing at all. Especially when measuring to such a tight standard and regulated standard as "when you get bored."
More features then you will use is not bloated..it's more featured then you need, nothing more. Every one of those features could be very tightly written.
Of course, my point is that you can not base bloat in any of these manners.
If I have two applications with equal features, and one is 100K, and another is 100MB you have one with bloat.
"Give a program that does one thing well, loads fast and has an "Advanced Options" checkbox
you are so caught up in pushing your favorite, you are missing the point.
If I created soemthing that does exactly what VLC does, but is half the size then your VLC probably has bloat. That doesn't make it bad. It could also just be a better compiler.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Notepad isn't standalone at all. It relys on a massive library set called Windows for its UI.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
edlin For a few tasks, there's never been anything on an MS platform superior. Too bad they dropped it long ago.
CD ripping: abcde. Easy to control and customize.
Text editor: vim Yes, it is bigger than, say, nvi. But on most any machine, it usually runs lightning fast.
Shell: zsh. Not one of the smallest CLI shells, but very capable and well-documented. In many ways, easier to use than any GUI shell (and much lighter compared to any GUI shell.)
Calculator: command-line wcalc
Finances: Ledger whips everything I have ever tried; I would never switch to a GUI program for this again.
Lists and databases: colon-delimeted plain text files. Search and get records with awk or grep. Quicker and easier than spreadsheets, and I could (should) easily encrypt them with GPG.
Nutrition tracking: see sig (immodestly)
Task tracking: todo.txt
Photo sorting: just use GNOME's Nautilus and folders; all the photo album apps seem to be too much trouble. Wrote a zsh script to pull photos from memory cards, rename them so I know what camera they came from, rotate them, and dump them into a hard-drive folder so I can sort them out.
Light doesn't always pay: I got tired of trying to configure Fluxbox and Gentoo; now I'm on GNOME and Ubuntu. Light also doesn't pay for things done infrequently, as light often comes with a bigger learning curve. I usually resort to GUI tools to, for example, add users to the system.
I wish I could find a good CLI audio player--full featured, but CLI. MPD seems to come closest, but it can't get me away from Amarok. Similarly, GNUpod is pretty good for ipods, but I move stuff in and out of my iPod fairly rarely so I found Amarok is just easier to use.
Penny - plain text accounting
WordWeb rules (I just wish they'd come out with a linux port soon, Skype is pretty handy, CCleaner, Eusing free registery cleaner for Windows is absolutely amazing, 7-Zip, and Clamwin Anti-virus. I love GIMP too, but it could go on a diet.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
If you want to ping a range to find all responding machines and open ports, this one rocks. Under 120K, remembers settings and you can config a ton of options. Very useful port scanning tool. Single EXE requires nothing else in windows, you can even link to it directly from their website and run it right in memory, never touch the disk. http://www.angryziber.com/ipscan/
All your favorite shell utils bundled into one relatively-small binary.
Have EVDO, will travel.
Most the best Windows freeware is written by some dude in Europe:
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Total commander as file browser / ftp / fxp is realy great.
Fluxbox: tons of functionality, easy to configure and a small footprint. I know there are smaller out there, but if you consider the functionality/size ratio, it kicks ass.
\033:wq!
My favorite is still NUMOFF.COM, which as the name implies, turns off the numlock key.
Unfortunately, I was unable to find the original 8 byte version, All I have is this bloated 11 byte one;
B8 40 00 8E D8 80 26 17 00 DF C3
-- Should you believe authority without question?
Anything written by Steve Gibson.
Google Docs and Spreadsheets. They take up no hard drive space beyond what I'm already using for Firefox.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
Until a few months ago when I bought a new MacBook (and had to start using Word 2004 because of the lack of Classic mode for Intel), I'd used Word 5.1 more or less every day for the better part of 14 years. It's still the fastest word processor I've ever used. Bootup in one second on a 466MHz G3 iBook? Hell yeah! In contrast, Word 2004 is the only program that regularly gives me the spinning beachball on a 2.14Ghz Core Duo.
The only thing from my point of view that Word 5.1 lacked was a live word count. If Intel Macs ran Classic, I'd still be using Word 5.1 on a daily basis.
You must think in Russian.
Back when all you needed was a VT100 and computers didn't have audio devices, you didn't have all this bloat.
But if you must play mpg files, then my vote is mpg123 -- a nice command line mpg file player, you can even pipe the output to the screen. Or decode to a WAV file, modify that in Perl, then send it to a SOAP application on another server that routes it to your boombox -- all without any pointing or clicking!
If you want to have real control over your music collection, and don't want to have your files hidden by a candy interface...
$ cd ~/my_music/hip_hop
$ ls
MC_Frontalot
$ cd MC*
$ ls
Nerdcore_HipHop.mp3 Penny_Arcade_Theme.mp3
$ mpg123 -qy *.mp3
-- I browse at +5 with stripped sigs
With Perl, to be able to read the core language, you have to know how
parses and what it means. You have to know that how an expression like is even parsed depends upon how 'x' is defined. Once you learn perl you don't need a big set of reference books to explain every obscure library. I think you do. You may think that you know what a regular expression likePerl may have its virtues, but it's definitely a big, hairy, sweaty, greasy, stinky, drooling beast of a language.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
/dev/null
Nope. No bloat there.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I would recommend against using Miranda. Sure, I once had the same opinion as you - nice, light IM utility. I thought it was perfect. After a few months of use, however, I discovered an annoying small bug.
It drops all your incoming messages into a black hole. It seems as though you're online, and it's working fine. But your friends don't respond to you. You never receive the messages they send. This also happened to a friend using Miranda, after a few months of use. It is disconcerting until you discover what's happened.
Maybe it's fixed by now, I'd hope so. This happened with their newest release about six months ago.
The app , which we still run on an OS9 box, is about 500k in size and takes about 10-20MB of RAM when running. It can handle hundreds of domains and thousands of email boxes. It doesn't do everything an MTA might do, but it is simple, fast, and elegant.
I've been using it for about 10 years.
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.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I consider my time more valuable than the RAM for which I have already paid (RAM is a sunk cost at that point).
I would much rather have Bloat-O-Shop take 20 seconds and whatever resources it needs to apply a filter to a huge image than wait 20 MINUTES for Gimp to do the same task in a tiny amount of RAM, assuming I have configured Gimp to use RAM sparingly. I can turn around and send out that image 19 minutes, 40 seconds sooner than the guy (a girl would not be so foolish) using an identical installation of Gimp, so whom do you think gets more work in the future?
[x] I do not expect these arguments to be persuasive to those who spend days/weeks/months slaving over a hot terminal session cranking out software, only to give it away for free.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
Well, I liked it back around v1.3 with no installer, and only a 9mb imprint.
On Ubuntu at least mplayer throws up an IPV6 error unless you configure it to not bother with IPV6. Since most users won't want IPV6, I think that'd count as bloat.
Well, I am on Windows, for better or for worse. There are a few i really like.
1. Total Commander - A super-fast and powerful file manager.
2. UltraEdit - A text editor.
3. MiniAim - a 74k AIM client.
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
xmonad is a tiling window manager in about 500 lines of Haskell code.
Features:
It's minimalistic, has everything I need with dmenu.
Oh, and it's very actively developed.
I cannot hardly believe I am saying it, but EMACS indeed. There was a time, not too long ago, that I would kill any process that was taking more memory than EMACS because there had to be something terribly wrong with any process taking that much memory. Now, EMACS takes seemingly no memory and runs really fast. Beside, there was a new release, after 6 short years. What's not to like? EMACS - The first Portable OS / virtual machine ELISP - The first run-anywhere computer language. Runs anywhere there is EMACS.
Your friend and well-wisher
m0smithslash
http://www.ferociousflirting.com
Rox would be a great (lightweight) alternative to Gnome/KDE except...
it relies on 0install, which is horrible. The Rox filer works fine as standalone, but I wish they'd get their act together and make a decent installer. Not everyone has continuous Internet access! (Especially the machines that actually need memory conservation.)
Xara Xtreme still clocks in at just over 6MB---not too bad. (Plus another 6 in DLLs.)
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) Putty (Telnet/SSH)
The amount of programs we have in common gave me shivers...maybe this is how geeks should do online personal ads? I can see it now:
Hi, I'm Ted, and I use OpenBSD with the following programs.....
www.purevolume.com/martyd
Actually, I used to use Azureus, and there were several patches made to fix 100% CPU utilization and RAM usage problems in the past. I can't recall if it were due to updates to JRE that caused this, but to say that Azureus has always been an efficient application is white-washing the program's history. I switched to uTorrent specifically because of these issues, and the vastly smaller memory usage led me to keep using uTorrent.
If you only have 64MB of ram, that's 2.56MB... great! If you have 4GB thats 160MB, which is awful. Giving percentages as your only measurement is pretty much useless.
or 2GB, in outlook.
(I know I got modded troll, offtopic, and lame for this the other day)
Please stop stalking me, bro.
I'm shocked that nobody has posted Camino (mac web browser). (or else, i'm shocked that the search didn't find said post ;). Uses the gecko rendering engine (so usually, if a page works in firefox, it works in camino), but throws away all the other crap from Firefox.
There is something similar called, i think, Galeon, for X11.
Everyone should be at least a little familiar with vi. When the fit hits the shan, sometimes it's all you've got to get out of the doo doo.
When that happens you don't want 'vi' you need vim.
Anyone whose ever spent time programming in emacs knows the name stands for "escape, meta, alt, control, shift"
;)
If you've never met a 'meta' key before... well... go buy yourself a real computer
Why limit ouselves to apps and not talk about bloat-free sites as well? Google's search homepage is a good example of bloat-free design, I think.
I agree with you that Crimson Editor is absolutely wonderful, and I'd still be using it if it weren't for a fatal (to me) bug:
It garbles big files. Try openning a file with 10,000 lines or more, change something, then save. Some lines end up in wrong places and such.
Unfortunately development on Crimson Editor seems to have stopped 3 years ago. I wish it weren't so..
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
at a morbidly obese 15288 bytes, what more could anyone need?
to drive the demand for more RAM, HD space, processor power, etc.
Yesterday I put 2GB of memory into my cell phone, giving it about ten times the storage of the first desktop computer I bought in 1993.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
wget - grab url without any annoying save dialog boxes
elinks - text-based wysiwyg
calc - http://sf.net/projects/calc
vlc - cause it can play just about anything without concern on local OS dependencies
ImageMagic suite - these tools rock - most notably 'convert'
awk and sed - you'd be surprised how many times I've used awk and sed on a text/csv file in 5 seconds to do what someone else takes hours to do in a spreadsheet
find, grep, and xargs - with this trio, I can do in 1 minute what takes other people hours or days to do
scp - so much better than ftp for so many reasons
rsync - there are so many very expensive commerical data replication solutions that basically are just GUI wrappers around rsync
htop - I just like it. Fast, colorful, unbloated
tkdiff - one of the best graphical diff tools around. Small, simple, fast.
screen - take your console session with you
vncserver and vncclient - while I don't like their non-pam OS authenticaiton, they're great tools. Fast and lightweight
rdesktop
audacity
pidgin
still under 64K (an exe program) and requiring a DOS boot, this will fix any disk that runs and seeks and can still find magnetism on the platter. been around since something like 1991, and the program essentially reverse-engineers the disk and controller based on what it can see to non-destructively low-level format when needed. www.grc.com
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Oh sweet mama pajamas... a nine-hundred-reply thread of Slashdot ubergeeks engaging in a contest of "my tool is smaller than yours"?
You just know eHarmony is farming this thread for user names and banning them on the fly.
ROT26 - that's twice as powerful as ROT-13!!!!11!
Edxor, which supports encryption and if *fast*. Find it along with other Win32 stuff at http://members.ozemail.com.au/~nulifetv/freezip/fr eeware/.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
You youngsters and your low expectations.
IEFBR14 takes up exactly 2 bytes of executable code.
Never fails, ever.
Eclipse
I'm a software visionary. I don't code.
Scorched Earth The Mother of All Games http://scorch.classicgaming.gamespy.com/
DVDDecrypter... Best...Utility...Ever!
Sure, it has a rather minimal memory footprint, however my real issue with it is the amount of CPU it takes up. I'm looking at taskmanager right now, with foobar not even playing a song, and foobar is spiking at about 47% CPU. (the latest foobar, 0.9.whatever, on a 1.6 GHz AMD cpu, btw.) It always acts like this for me... Why? Columns-UI? The minimal skin I've applied?? It only seems to peak at around 55% cpu usage when actually playing MP3s, FLAC, etc. *boggle* (Any advice here, greatly appreciated.)
My "SO FAR" quip relates to the fact that Amarok (http://amarok.kde.org/) should soon be usable on Windows. I hardly care about the memory footprint there... I've been waiting for it for quite some time now. I'm 99.8% sure that I'll be using it instead of foobar when the day finally arrives!
norton antivirus!
not only is time travel possible, it's irrelevant.
Give slackware booting to runlevel 3, gnu screen, gnu coreutils, vim, lynx/links/w3m/elinks, lftp, rtorrent, and moosic a try. There are many others of course.
. . . is when it's dynamically linked (e.g., FreeBSD), and your problem is preventing /usr from mounting . . .
hawk, who was surprised to find that he could still use ed
im the author of twsinit, something I expermented with a while ago
in the end I got it down to 4KiB RSS (one stack page), still performing its function flawlessly.
all an init program needs to do is run some startup scripts and catche sigchld signals anyways.
I even went on to agetty after that, getting that down to 4KiB aswell.
Everything else on the system was the same btw, all I did was swap out sysv init and rewrite configs.
I'd like to see anyone saying 4KiB is inefficient.
/pro
A great place to look for bloatless software are Portable Apps. Most of them are compact yet still work great for there intended purpose.
http://www.portableapps.com/
1. vim (any kind of text editing)
2. elinks (mainly for reading html documentation, but browsing the web is ok too! hey, no flash fat!)
3. xmms (media-playing)
4. gnumeric (spreadsheets)
I don't feel like it...
I feel the same way... uTorrent is perfect on Windows, a good alternative on OSX is Transmission. I used to use Azureus and since it got bundled with that crap beta thing they did it sucks. Then I switched to XTorrent, which in idea it sounds good, but it sucks as well. Later on I got so frustrated I tried other torrent apps for Mac like:
.torrent file onto the piece of AppleScript to initiate the transfer. One pro is that it's an extremely light client that hogs very little RAM. It's the closet thing to uTorrent on the Mac.
.torrent file to its support folder, then trash the original file from my desktop thereby leaving no mess of files behind for me to clean up. Now just like everything Transmission has its flaws, the biggest of which is that Demonoid, a leading BitTorrent directory has banned it on ocassion! They say it doesn't adhere to set standards.
Tomato Torrent is a very plain alternative, seriously lacking in eye-candy and begging for a new icon (and maybe a new name too). It's based on the official BitTorrent client. I think it desrves a mention because I know a few people who swear by it. It comes with an AppleScript file that you can place in folders you want to download to. When you want to download a torrent to a specific folder, you just drag the
Bits on Wheels is a slightly out-dated (last updated Sep. '05), yet popular Mac BitTorrent client. It claims to be "the first 100% native BitTorrent client for the Macintosh" as it is written in Objective-C and Cocoa. Bits on Wheels is freeware but not Open Source. One of its main features is a visual 3D Swarm with which you can observe what's actually going on under the hood, how many seeders and leechers you're connected to and the bits transferring between everyone. Bits on Wheels is very OSeXy (heh!), it's how I'd imagine the default OS X BitTorrent downloader to look if there was one. bits on wheels sawrmIf not to use the first native OS X B.T. client, I'd download it just to fly around in 3D chasing bits.
And lets not forget the grandaddy of them all, Bram Cohen's self-titled BitTorrent application. It's gotten kind of confusing since he named the protocol, his company and his application all BitTorrent. BitTorrent OSX is a very (and I mean very) basic application. It's as feature-full as Safari's download box and that's not saying much. Now some people wouldn't mind something like that, but if you're looking for simplicity Transmission is a much better choice. BitTorrent OSX also takes an age to start up on my MacBook Pro.
Transmission is my current Mac B.T. client of choice. TransmissionIt's an Open Source project, maintained by the developer of the popular Mac DVD ripping application, HandBrake. Transmission does its job well. A neat feature it offers is the ability to view download and upload rates in the dock, so I don't even have to open up the program to check how my downloads are going. Another great thing Transmission does is copy the
For the different torrent apps I mentioned here you can go to:
Bit Torrent OSX: http://www.bittorrent.com/
Transmission: http://transmission.m0k.org/
Tomato Torrent: http://sarwat.net/BitTorrent/
Bit On Wheels: http://www.bitsonwheels.com/
Hope that helps!
Kil
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
I vote for the original Oberon-0 operating system and programming language by Niklaus Wirth. That system used only 300K bytes. It includes the compiler, graphical user interface, documentation, file system, and more. The system is modular and strongly typed.
You're right! OS standard widgets and UI libraries are for fools! A program isn't a proper program unless it implements everything from radio buttons to window management tools completely from scratch in a way guaranteed to utterly confuse anyone who hasn't spent 87 hours learning the its precise eccentricities! "Consistency" and "learnability" are for people who want usable software, not cool software!
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Qmail I think is the best bloatfree software I have seen. The only problem with it is setting it up is a little on the annoying side.
For some reason this made me think of Bastian being told he needs to name the Childlike Empress in Neverending Story.
The Unbloated Software: Bastian. Why don't you do what you dream, Bastian?
Bastian: But I can't, I have to keep my feet on the ground!
The Unbloated Software: Call my name. Bastian, please! Save us!
Bastian: All right! I'll do it! I'll save you! I will do what I dream!
Bastian: MOONCHILD!
Love CCleaner, small footprint, scriptable and free plus it works.. http://www.ccleaner.com/features SD
that, coupled with screen, is perfect for doing remote or unattended torrent downloads.
[dana@pippin ~]$ ps aux|grep evilwm|grep -v grep
dana 3377 0.0 0.1 3560 428 tty1 S Jul20 0:26 evilwm
[dana@pippin ~]$
At the risk of being totally flamed, I prefer OpenBSD for setting up a barebones server without extra bloat.
Of course, there are specialized linux distros that are very tiny, DSL, Puppy and Slax comes into mind, but they are desktop distros.
Windows Vista...!!! oh wait a minute...
Oops! wrong article! hehehe
[ravingfanboyhat="on"]
...whew, glad I got that out of my system.
PMView -- http://www.pmview.com/
Absolutely hands down, the best image conversion/management program ever written. It originally started out over a decade ago for OS/2 and as it moved to Windows, it has only gotten better. And they just went Vista compatible to boot!
and
AC3D -- http://www.inivis.com/
When it comes to 3-D modeling tools, AC3D is cheap, fast, simple to use, with an easy to understand interface right from first launch... none of this spending a billion dollars on a program and then needing to take a year of classes just to make a friggin' cube. Added bonus, built in support for exporting 3-D models to Second Life sculpties format without all the stupid limitations found in *every* other modeler.
Now go check'em out!
[/ravingfanboyhat="off"]
Jarte: A complete word processor that's under 3 megs!
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
I imagine it is the skin. I've had it running(on a modest core duo), with columnsUI and no skin(or the generic one, whatever), since September fourth, and it has consumed 40 *seconds* of cpu time(so it is using something like 1 second an hour, which is about 0.03%).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I'm all about musikcube
Very lightweight, and fast, but unfortunately Windows only. Highly recommended though.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
Maybe it's been a while since you tried Konqueror, because most of the things you mention are supported in the 3.5 series.
Blocking animated images is possible, you can even allow them to run once but not repeat.
You can set site-specific policies for JavaScript.
Although blocking of flash, background music and videos is not directly controllable, there is the option of disabling plugins for selected sites, which is good enough in most cases.
And blink tags? I haven't seen one of those in years. I guess I would just close the tab if I'd encounter one; no serious site would even consider using them.
Rick Brewster's ListXP is a very useful and fast text file viewer, designed to mimic Vernon D. Buerg's LIST.COM. It handles huge files just as easily as tiny ones, has a hex display mode, an optional context menu Explorer extension, and various other goodies.
But, I need some money. Please send me some. I work my ass off, so I deserve your support.
Thanks!
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Windows XP also booted faster than 2k.
An entire software suite that can still run on a 286 PC with 1mb of memory. Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Publishing, draw and database are the main part of the suite and it all fits in 11-17mb. It was the software ripped off by windows 95 to show "motif" icons. Icons that are associated with the program that created it. If you go back even further it was the first graphical interface used on an Apple machine (Apple IIe) and the first true graphical interface that ran on a PC XT. I first used it on a Commodore 64. The last version produced could run under Dos, Win95, 98, Me and XP...Vista will not run it, but you could create a floppy dos boot disk and keep it on a small Fat partion and still use it on a Vista machine (if the cpu will let you). At one time Geos offered a pretty robust demo program, I think it was called NewPublish that still might be floating around on the net. This link seems to have it but I don't know if it's the english version. http://www.siemens.md.st.schule.de/~rainerb/DOWNPU B.HTM
Now defunct, but WriteNow was the speediest, friendliest word processor around for a long time. I think the whole thing took 4 floppies (the version before the last one I used was on two floppies, I think). If I remember the marketing hype correctly, it was all written in assembly, hence its high speed and good power-weight ratio.
:) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WriteNow This is exactly the sort of thing for which I praise WP about 20 times a day.
It was originally for the NeXT, I think, then ported to Apple.
Heh, no, I had it backwards -- see this very nice Wikipedia article
Tim
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Now I saw tons of lists for media players and other semi-work related apps, but there are some REAL killers when you are in the fun department.
Mupen (Or more specifically Mupen++) takes like 6 mb. It's totally portable, runs under wine, and contains nearly everything needed to play over 300 Nintendo 64 games. I pack this and about 20 of my favorite games on a USB stick, and take them with me everywhere I go.
If you want even smaller file sizes, you can do the same with Super Nintendo roms, but for my money Mario Kart 64 is one of the best games ever made, and well worth the 9mb. Other favorites on my USB stick:
Bust A move 7mb
Dr Mario 3mb
Super Mario 64 6mb
Mortal Kombat 4 13mb
Plus, let's face it, most of those old console titles are much more fun than even the latest hi budget commercial DirectX titles....
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I have a program - I have no idea where I got it from, and I've probably had it for 20 years - named Browse. And that's what it does. That's all it does. It allows you to browse text files, either move up or down a line, or a screen at a time, or go to the top or bottom of the file. Handles files which use either CRLF, CR or LF for end of line so you can view MSDOS or Unix/Mac text files. It's an MSDos program, browse.com, maximum memory it uses is 16K. No, you didn't misread me, not 16meg, 16K; no matter how large a text file you give it, the program only uses 16K of memory. The program file itself is exactly 1,024 bytes.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Debian network version is under 200mb. I don't have to download and install, and de-install, a lot of cruft that I don't want. Also, with debian, I don't have to download a new version every six months, or whatever. I just keep updating the system I have. Best package management in the business.
IceWM: does what I need, seems crisper, and snappier, than gnome or kde.
W2K: best OS msft ever developed, IMO. Very fast on a 900mhz system with 384mb of ram. Works with all of my hw/sw. No cartoon interface.
It can save your ass when X takes a dump (not too often, but it does happen). And it can run in a terminal when X is working.
I spent considerable time looking for a "pretty" replacement for mc, and eventually gave up. Nothing managed to do everything that mc does as quickly, as easily and conveniently. There are some nice file managers out there, but every one I tried wound up lacking something that I really like about mc.
Opera is my browser of choice, because what memory and disk space it does use pays off in performance. For documents that don't need the OO capabilities, AbiWord is great.
I also regularly use Xfig and pcb (although pcb understandably requires at least a little horsepower to run). XV is surprisingly capable for a viewer, even though it looks a tad ugly by today's standards.
Before AfterStep got all clunky and slow (at least around the time they made the transition to 2.0), I used it. Now I use Fluxbox. I still use fetchmail and pine. When alpine comes a little further along, I'll probably give it a try.
The one solid disappointment for me has been Tux racer. I have never really been able to successfully play that game with any kind of responsiveness on anything but a powerful machine. I remember it being included in the Red Hat 5.2 distribution and there was no way it would play on my 120 MHz 486 with 32 MB of RAM. Ah, the good old days...
I use DWM (Dynamic Window Manager), from suckless.org as my primary window manager now, after switching from Fluxbox. The code is clean and fast. Configuration (colours and whatnot), is handled by editing the C code and recompiling, which takes about 2 seconds on my AMD64 3200+ running Gentoo Linux. (Compilation needed on all distros). Works just as well on OpenBSD 4.1.
Most of the WM is controlled by key commands and supports a wonderful tilemode, for maximum efficiency. No desktop icons, no menus, no clutter. Based off of wmii.
I used to run Lynx, but many sites require javascript these days. Though if I didn't have to worry about javascript these days, I'd probably go with dillo. Mozilla and Firefox both take several seconds to start up on my 1.8GHz supercomputer!
Realize you are talking to someone who, when his hard drive died, didn't buy a new one for a year because he was satisfied with using boot floppies and a live CD.
I use e3 for my editing needs. The staticly linked binary is just under 13k.
Transitioning from windows to linux I couldn't find a decent alternative to Winamp - XMMS and Beep just didn't cut it. I found them to be unpolished, ugly and XMMS skipped and stuttered atrociously. But I found mpd (music played daemon) and gmpc (gnome music player client) a really excellent, small and intuitive pair of programs to use - of course there are other clients for mpd, but gmpc is my first choice.
- mpd: http://www.musicpd.org/
- gmpc: http://www.musicpd.org/gmpc.shtml
And for debian/ubuntu users:"Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing." -- Salvador Dali
I'm guessing that after the next patch, it will mysteriously bloat to 80,286 bytes?
Yes it's an anti-virus program, but I'm really impressed with how: a) small it is (12MB exe...compare that to Norton) b) efficient it runs - two processes and no performance hit c) fast it scans - my other antivirus (no bashing here) took almost an hour for a detailed scan. NOD did it in 20 minutes. this is not an ad; you asked for my favorite 'non-bloatware' Sorry if it's not up to your 47k standards like 'ed' ;)
If it ain't broke, DON'T fix it.
I commend to you "Metapad" by Alexander Davidson : http://www.liquidninja.com/metapad/
Not very highly featured, but still streets ahead of Notepad - zipfile < 50Kb, .exe < 100Kb with no installation required ! Outstanding if you just want something more bearable and less brain-dead than Notepad. I install it everywhere I don't need a more fully-fledged programmer's editor.
It hasn't been changed since 2005, but doesn't really need it - not for my purposes anyway. Has little touches like making hyperlinks within the text content hot (clickable).
If you don't pray in my school, I won't think in your church.
That's the show stopper question.
...
You may be perfectly fine with it defaulting to hogging some percentage of your available RAM.
My sister, the one who would supposedly benefit from the back-set driving, may only want to clean up some old photos. Her iBook is maxed out (for that model) at 768M. 256M would be plenty for her, but your optimistic 80% setting would have her copy of Gimp setting itself to run with 614M, leaving her with 154M for the OS, NeoOffice, AppleMail, Safari, iPhoto, iMovie,
Sure. I should buy her a new MacBook with 2G.
And while we're dreaming, are you going to buy me that prototyping box for a little project I want to do with embedded CPUs, so I can afford to get her the MacBook? Or even a used sempron notebook that I can load Linux on and use on the train instead of staring into space?
Setting the amount of memory an app uses is a familiar concept to those of us who used Macs back in the pre-Mac-OS-X days. Some apps, the programers can guess by estimating average useage. Others, like image editors, need the user to tell them what's reasonable. There may be a good way of getting that feedback without too much burden on the user, but that wouldn't be an install dialog. And you'd want to avoid the not-so-odd case when a user test launched an app a couple of times before digging into serious use.
Troll and flame points have a hidden complementary value for me. I suspect, someone provided you a complement point, and now they can not use the point as insightful, informative ... which means the "troll point" has double/bonus value. It was not used to under-rate another /. person, and it was not used to over-rate any dumb M$ comments. May all the gods bless you and your comment.
... you are never alone.
Today I was talking with someone about dBase (Ratliff), CP/M (KilDall, and Ashton Tate, because a person thought dBase was created by IBM. I suspect, many folks today (like the politicians) believe M$ created the first word-processor and spreadsheet.
Well you got another irrational troll-point
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Where do you measure bloat?
In the count of reserved words (built-in operators and other identifiers), as you seem to be suggesting?
In the size of the executable?
Or in the examples manual?
Or in the layers of abstraction over the hardware?
What about the initial steepness or overall height of the learning curve?
How about the part of the language executable that is not available to the run-time?
Oh, and FORTH is a perfectly valid way to write Forth, even though it is not an acronym, per se. At least one of the early manuals recommended capitalizing the name. (Of course, you hardly ever see people write ForTran or CoBOL any more, but they are not wrong.)
joudanzuki
It certainly starts a hell of a lot faster than Firefox or Thunderbird do in the morning, and it can be fully operated by keystrokes, which is handy for an IRC client.
Also great is any of the original games played on a Commodore 64 Emulator. Even at pokey dial-up speeds were I live, even the most complex C64 game downloads in only a few seconds flat!
Future Crew's "Starport 2" BBS ad was the tightest, most cleverly-optimized, elegant piece of assembly code I've ever seen. The binary was even zero-byte-reduced to fit in exactly 1993 bytes, which was the year it was written. And it implemented a surprising amount of functionality in such a small binary.
See info at http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=12217
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Acroread is an awfully bloated piece of software. Back in my early days with Linux (around 1997), I tried xpdf, but it seemed to be unable to correctly render many pdf files. Recently, I tried it again and it has changed a lot. It works flawlessly and as an avid LaTeX+Beamer user, I find it very, very useful. Who needs Adobe spyware anymore ?
Oh, and BTW, I switched from Firefox 1.5.x to Firefox 2.0.0 on my old 2002 iBook with 384MB RAM, which still runs 10.2.8 (I know...) and found it significantly sluggisher...
Any version of iTunes prior to video being added. I have no idea what the relative size was, but it always felt more sensible and smaller than WinAmp.
After video was added, I still wouldn't categorize iTunes as bloatware, but it no longer *felt* slim.
I think there's two categories in this survey.
A. Designed efficiently so that new hardware does = speed increase. Each user has different feature requirements, so some might need to hyperlink spreadsheet fields, others might call it feature creep.
B. Minimialist Aesthetic, as a programming exercise or to demonstrate program size vs. cpu speed. For example, the candytron farbrausch demo mentioned above creates dancing a dancing 3d woman with 64 k of code. Because the limiting factor was code size, they took advantage of cpu rendering power that was not available in the 8-bit days.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I saw some remarks in various posts elsewhere that said Open Office was suffering from feature creep.
I also think an explosion of features subtly exhausts the user. I'll have to look at OpenOffice Portable - Calc & Writer to see how those work.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I thought the whole point of the iPods was that iTunes enabled the DRM necesary to play stuff from Apple. I'm rather surprised to hear that you installed something else.
I think I remember also not being a fan of iTunes' design.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Sure.
And what makes sense to you today might make you cringe next year. It's important for both/all of those visions to be possible.
P.S. That link gives me a "no music found" error.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
WinAmp. I got out of the habit of that, for zero good reason.
Fun skins, no-nonsense operation, didn't seem too excessive. (Go away, RealPlayer).
I'll put it back on my list of stuff to do.
Meanwhile, Mirrorshades is great.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Gui, whether X, Windows, whatever, uses resources. Trying for light, remember the old days and the command line? Ever notice on nix servers they don't run X (normally)?
Thanks to Contiki OS you can have a complete operating system with a web browser on a good ol' C64, Atari 800... Now that's unbloated software!
I use moc (music on console) for all my music-playing. It's lightweight, fast, plays the formats I use, got a great interface, and last but not least: it navigates in the directory structure, rather than using a tag-database.
The app was around 30k. 10k was the compiler, 10k was the "Integrated UI, 10k was the runtime library. It was too "bloated" to be very sucessful with CPM, but on the early PCs, which usually had 256k or so, it was just brilliant. That is what got me off my Mainframe/Fortran jones.
:(
I just installed the new Visual Studio Beta (Oracas). The thing is like 3 GB
Hmm... ed is small???
/bin/ed /bin/cat /usr/bin/e3 /usr/bin/vim.tiny /bin/cat /bin/ed /usr/bin/e3 /usr/bin/vim.tiny
Let's see...
& ls -axl
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 18148 2007-07-30 12:10
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 40704 2007-08-13 14:12
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 13386 2007-02-02 22:47
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 593412 2007-08-28 20:29
I think with 14k, the e3 editor is quite as efficiently coded as possible while still easily usable. However, I know some AmigaOS apps that are smaller (and more usable). It's all a matter of what libraries get linked. C is a rather bloated language (although most people see it as a slim one nowadays). The "hello world" program in different languages can differ a lot. I remember testing AmigaE, C and AmigaBASIC (a Microsoft product). AmigaBASIC was around 50kb, C around 16kb (because I had to include stdout.h), E just 4kb. And you could get smaller using False, but who can program that? The entry level in Linux seems to be now 20kb, just to be able to do something at all. Using stuff like Java or Mono will surely increase the size of the executable.
Programming has changed: We are not forced to deal with limited resources, but we like to re-use prebuild libraries and modules quick 'n' easy. This is mostly no problem because computers are waiting most of the time for the user or the network or the disk or whatever. But when it really matters (like processing gigabytes of image data or vector data, compiling a large project etc.), programmers might consider doing this part in plain C or assembler (while still trying to keep portable).
5315 nano 0.0% 0:00.00 1 13 16 120K 768K 416K 26.7M 5314 emacs-i386 0.0% 0:00.01 1 13 23 808K 3.96M 2.48M 47.0M 5310 vim 0.0% 0:00.04 1 13 18 796K 1.54M 2.01M 27.7M Surprising size on the nano, IMO.
And what makes sense to you today might make you cringe next year. It's important for both/all of those visions to be possible.
I agree whole-heartedly.
P.S. That link gives me a "no music found" error.
Fixed, try again now. It appears Soundclick changed their site, and broke old-style links.
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
5314 emacs-i386 0.0% 0:00.01 1 13 23 808K 3.96M 2.48M 47.0M
5310 vim 0.0% 0:00.04 1 13 18 796K 1.54M 2.01M 27.7M
Surprising size on the nano, IMO. Damnit! Forgot the line breaks. Sorry.
My vote also once would have gone to uTorrent, which I ran with Wine on Linux, but Deluge is even less bloated without missing any functionality. That it is a native app and GPL, are bonuses, too.
Spine World
Tweak Opera? That's unpossable!
First of all, you're measuring the wrong resources. Second, a program clearly needs to use some resources to do anything at all. Since your measurements show them all as zero, it's clear that it isn't measuring them with fine enough precision to produce meaningful results.
Your last sentence is quite telling: what you did was perfectly sensible today -- but years ago, it would not have been, which was pretty much my point from the beginning. In fact, static linking was all that was available on most systems years ago. When you use dynamic linking, you're substituting a large complex system for even attempting to make your code as small as possible -- i.e. you're basically writing exactly the sort of bloated code that started this discussion.
Now, don't get me wrong: I don't intend that as a personal accusation of wrongdoing, or anything like it -- it's a simple, practical and effective method of getting decent results with a minimum of effort. Given the cost of computer resources in general (low and dropping) vs. time and effort of programmers (high and rising), using extra machine resources to save programming time and effort makes good economic sense -- but back when computer resources were a lot more expensive, the reverse was true.
Now, if you had bothered with static linking and such, you might have found a rather more substantial difference than the .02% you mentioned. As a comparison, I did a quick bit of compiling myself. Using static linking and optimization, the version using printf came out to 23,552 bytes. By eliminating the standard library and calling the system directly, I was able to reduce that to an executable of 752 bytes. That's a reduction in size of more than 30:1.
It's obviously open to a lot of question whether that reduction is really worth the bother -- especially since it's much more difficult to get that kind of reduction for real code. OTOH, the basic point of the original article was that the author appreciated people who did bother.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
And it came on two 5.25" floppies.
mark "one of these days, I ought to see if I can run it under WINE"
Besides consistency and learnability, using standard dlls can also reduce bloat - a program that tries to reimplement the wheel will be larger, and likely slower.
For one thing, a proper system dll, such as what's used to create standard windows and buttons should be highly error-checked, and therefore stable, not to mention highly optimized to make it faster.
A good 'lean and mean' program should make use of system dll files whenever it makes sense.
Take Media player classic versus windows media player. Both use external code to play their media. That's just fine.
From what I remember, 7 or 8 wasn't bad, then 9 was horrible, 10 is getting better(at least you can hide most of the crud), I haven't used 11.
The creaters of classic realize something important. People want to watch videos more than they want a fancy 'skin' that just gets in the way of playing videos.
For example, why should I dedicate as many pixels to the border and controls as I am the video? I might want to be doing something else with that screen space. And what's up with the majority of the controls being nonfunctional most of the time? Why do I have to hit ctrl-p to play/pause, instead of the nice big, easy to hit spacebar? Why did they shrink the seek bar, making it less accurate/easy to control, while not using the space gained for anything useful?
I'll frequently play a video in the corner of a screen while reading something else. When I'm doing that, I rarely need more controls than a play/pause button, and selecting the screen and hitting space works for that. The majority of the time, the only control visible with classic is the seek bar. It's a nice thin bar across the bottom that also tells me how far into the video I am, that I can easily adjust if I want to.
I don't read AC A human right
Though 'false' has its points too.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
For a bloat-free X app, you can't beat xlogo!
I think there's two categories in this survey.
Nicely put. I like that definition.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
My favorite non bloatware software is the Amarok media player. Yes - it is 32MB (installed) and has everything but the kitchen sink, but all of its features are useful (I think I've used every single one of them including wikipedia support)
Can't library incorporation be used so that only the relavant functions/classes be added to the code, to minimize bloatware? Or are compilers just too stupid to do this?
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
I prefer software that takes as little hard drive space and RAM as possible.
:)9i havent seen anything in the way of FTP cleints either. FXP works great for my needs, small n fast. only have to wait for that 'buy me window or be stuck with the fully functional trial!' window to disappear. what bout irc? mirc has become pussified. there anything out there small friendly and scriptable? /. right? usenet, ftp, irc, telnet, and noones even mentioned these things?
:(
noone has mentioned usenet (atleast when i loaded this page this mornin).
what bout xnews? doesnt need install, jsut extracted. can rebuild all indexs if jsut the exe is there. that and stunnel are neato
noone mentioned telnet clients either. i mean, this is
broswers will be memory hogs. i dunt like seeing firefox eating 800 megs of rams. but sincei have the ram, i do like using it.
distributed.net has a client that is much m,uch faster than seti crap or the like. distributed cracking of encryption schemes.
i have had news rover running for over a month and only using 15 meg of ram, same with xnews.
as for email, pine was nice, but soemthing had changed. i like foxmail. it does seem to be a lil kiddish/gay at first, but everything can be changed if ya know how. you have to get the language packs to read if it you dont know chinese. its small, doesnt need install, it works as any ware should.
xnews is dead
long live xnews
saw one post talking of the drivers for mice by logitech...
who uses anything them hardware comp0anies make? 3rd party stuff is usually smaller n faster and has more options. seems hardware companies only want to slow down what you jsut spent a month saving for. like western digis hard drive safe thingy. slows the whole system down, gobs of proc n ram. same with asus mother board monitor thingy, not the mother board monitor used by many other systems. i forgot what it was called, since i saw how it lagged my pc down when i installed thier stuffs. i since then changed 80% of my stuffs to 3rd party.
if thres any other small fast email ftp usenet or telnet clients, id liek to hear of em.
oh, theres FDM, freedownloadmanger.com people on broadband dont really need something like this i spose, but great for dialup. it does call home, but that can be turned off. never had a failed dl with it.
welp, thats my 2 cent on what small shits i like. i think i just let all kinda law enforcement know what i have installed on my machines.
i think all of you did also
soemone mentioned an AV that they dont have to mess with. i like kaspersky. all others seemed to only act like they were doing something. norton wont letyou remove an infected file. mcaffee is the same (own3d). i hae tried AVG, but it likes causing errors and random reboots. so far kaspersky has only dont what its sposed to. its like a ware, but its too big, and its functional. the scan could be faster tho
tick
"Those Who Would Sacrifice Liberty For Security Deserve Neither"
I always preferred Elm to Pine. To put an un-bloated way, vi is to emacs as Elm is to Pine.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
The classic hello.c program is my nomination. It must be popular as it is used so much by so many people. It is considered minimal in most circles.
Frontier: Elite II, it's so tiny, but such a old, full featured DOS 3d game.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
(excluding already mentioned ones in up-moded replies)
:P - http://cccp-project.net/ ) - pretty much created because the authors had enough of bloat in other solutions.
p ) - PDF printer, considerably outperforms PDFCreator (from Sourceforge) when creating laaarge documents.
NOD32 - probably least bloated antivirus, I don't notice it on 5 year old PC (even better when you turn off IMON module)
Google Talk (native Windows client) - while it doesn't have all the functionality of Skype (notably landline calling and video)...well, just compare them. Bonus: while Skype and Gtalk are roughly the same, quality-wise, on fast connection, Gtalk wins hands-down on slower ones.
Combined Community Coded Pack (CCCP
CutePDF Writer ( http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.as
Dorgem, Fwink - light webcam software, both on Surceforge.
Speedfan ( http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php ) - very light temp/fan speed/SMART monitoring app.
Most apps from Slysoft.
Official Last.fm player - quite good considering its download size and RAM usage (and well...basically its running all the time here)
Winrar - for a long time I'd recommend 7zip...but really, Winrar isn't that much heavier, but is...considerably faster than 7zip in decompressing large RAR archives here.
One that hath name thou can not otter
That's exactly what I wanted too, and this program is exactly that. My home network has a massive amount of data but I like to keep things as simple as possible, so it's all JBODs and this for backup.
http://www.rdcomp.net/ezbackitup/
I love it. The only thing missing is network support, you have to map network shares to drive letters to back them up, but I don't mind.
No, that isn't how it works.
Avast requires you to register with your email address once a year, purely for tracking purposes; you don't get spammed (or emailt at all actually) and it is no hassle.
There are no hints or any such to "buy" anything, but it's such a good product that you can be sure I recommend the free home version to everyone I talk to and the licensed business version to anyone who could use it.
The *simple* registration does stymie some people, but I have to admit that even when it's my friends it's just because they are stupid. At least their stupidity in that case isn't leading to Norton or McAfee being installed.
I disagree that this is "purely for tracking purposes". A side effect is certainly to make the full version more attractive.
There are a lot of people for whom such a "simple registration" is more than they can handle.
An unknown dialog box poping up is for them always a sign of something wrong, no matter the contents.
If your less computer-literate friends do not call you in those cases, you probably are far more selective with your friends than I. That does not mean they are stupid, just not versed with computers.
User-friendly would be if those products had a warning before installation "this product wil stop working once each year until you repeat an arbitrary and annoying procedure" Then i could either prepare my friends for that or stop recommending tht product altogether.
OS X: (I use the BSD utilities a lot... so very few additions)
Utilities:
The Unarchiver (Does Un-Rar and 7zip)
xPad (for when I'm not using vi)
Multimedia:
VLC (It's a bit bulky... would have preferred NicePlayer, but VLC plays it all)
Xee (great, quick, small multimedia viewer)
Internet:
Transmission (smaller than Azureus)
Camino (I use them all really... I still prefer Firefox for it's plugins though)
Adium
Windows:
Utilities:
Total Commander (with 7-zip, vim, and other plugins)
Multimedia:
Media Player Classic
iTunes (my little guilty pleasure... I have a vast library to manage cross-platform)
Irfanview
Internet:
uTorrent
Opera
Eudora (or previously Forte Agent)
Putty (Telnet/SSH)
Google Talk
via http://www.bitlbee.org/
One that hath name thou can not otter
Its probably too late to add anything to the discussion now but I can't believe no one else mentioned it so far. Billy is a wonderfully light audio player with minimalist footprint even after loading 500+ items to the playlist. Comes in both installer and portable versions. Switched from winamp to it during my college days and haven't gone back since.
Check out their site Sheep Friends. All the applications there are designed with the minimalist footprint idea in mind and I have been using almost all of them for years now.
1. Abby [Simple allround converter]
2. Billy [Lightweight audio player]
3. Diana [Basic notes]
4. Hawk [Hex file viewer]
5. Kelly [Desktop calculator]
6. Natty [Tray mail checker/notificator]
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
Actually, puts outputs a trailing newline...