Three Useful Utilities for the Linux Desktop

A good utility is worth it’s weight in ... well, whatever you use to weigh something valuable. And while you might not use certain utilities often, when you do I can bet that you’re happy those applications are installed on your computer.

Let’s take a quick look at three utilities for the Linux desktop that I find quite useful. Who knows, you might find them useful too.

BleachBit

It’s amazing how much cruft accumulates on your computer as time passes. Remnants of packages you’ve installed, temporary and backup files, thumbnails, browser history and cache items, and a whole lot more. Getting rid of a lot of that can be a chore.

That’s where BleachBit comes in. It’s a Program to clean unnecessary files, and using it can free up quite a bit of space on your hard drive. You can choose what you want BleachBit to clean up. Before you do the deed, you can click the Preview button to get an idea of what BleachBit is going to zap.

EasyTAG

I don’t know about you, but I don’t like it when a music file — regardless of its format — isn’t properly tagged. You know what I mean: title, artist, album, all that metadata.

Adding that information in isn’t fun. But EasyTAG makes the job a lot easier. Not only does it work with several audio file types, you can use EasyTAG to edit multiple files.

EasyTAG searches your /home directory for music files and enables you not only to add or edit tags, but also rename files and generate playlists.

regexxer Search Tool

Every so often, I need to find and/or replace text in multiple files. I can do that with some text editors, but it can be a hit or miss prospect.

regexxer Search Tool makes doing that surprisingly simple. Just point the tool at a folder, give it a file extension, and click Find files. Then, enter the text you want to Search for and, if needed, Replace. When you’re ready, fire away. If you made a mistake, don’t worry — you need to click Save all before regexxer applies your changes.

— Scott Nesbitt