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Software List

Table of Contents

Coding & Documentation

Markdown

  • Typora: locally Markdown editor, cross-platform, free.
  • MkDocs: a fast, simple and downright gorgeous static site generator that's geared towards building project documentation, cross-platform, free.
  • github-markdown-toc: A script that easily create Table of Content (TOC) for GitHub README.md, and for any Markdown file.
  • Obsidian: It is a powerful note-taking system that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files. Free for personal use. Obsidian works pretty well with connections between notes with graph view and backlinks that can help you visualize and figure out those connections and locate the content you want very quickly. I really like the GUI, the smooth reaction, page preview, slide presentation like Marp, templates/macros settings. Many core plugins can be used to customize your own note-taking toolkit. And what you get is really a folder of Markdown files, which allow you to sync your notes anywhere and reuse them seamlessly. See the repo below for a nice template.
  • Magic-wei/obsidian_wiki_template: A personal wiki or note-taking system template based on Obsidian. See details in README file to learn about features and useful settings of Obsidian. See introduction above to take a quick look into Obsidian.

Markdown tools that I'm not using any more but you can still take a look:

QR Code Tools

  • QRcode.show: Generate & show QR Code online in browser.
  • qrcode: An interesting Python tool to generate various kinds of QR code including common QR code, artistic QR code and animated QR code.

Github Tools

  • Socialify: A pretty nice online tool to help you generate a beautiful project image and share with the world.
  • Upptime: An open-source uptime monitor and status page, powered entirely by GitHub Actions and Issues.
  • git-history: Quickly browse the history of a file from any git repository.

Coding IDE

  • CLion: for CMake based C++ programming, cross-platform and free for student accounts (Free Educational Licenses Application). Clion supports ROS pretty well. You need to launch Clion from the command line to load ROS environment variables.
  • PyCharm: for Python programming, cross-platform and free for student accounts (Free Educational Licenses Application). It supports .ipynb notebook format. Using Anaconda and PyCharm can offer you excellent experiences when developing Python projects.
  • JetBrains Toolbox: Tool manager for JetBrains apps. With JetBrains Toolbox, you can install and update IDEs automatically to save time and effort maintaining your IDEs.
  • Sublime Text: Text editor for code, markup and prose, cross-platform (Mac, Windows and Linux) and free. Use Sublime Merge as a Git client along with Sublime Text.
  • MATLAB Online: Use MATLAB through your web browser with the latest version, get 5 GB cloud storage in Matlab Drive online, work with your MATLAB files from anywhere, and share them with others. MATLAB Online is available with select licenses, many universities provide campus-wide licenses for their students, double check here with the official name of your university and your official university email address, you will receive an email that tells you if your university has an active MATLAB campus-wide license.

Coding

  • PySimpleGUI: a young GUI toolkit launched in 2018 which transforms tkinter, Qt, Remi, WxPython into portable people-friendly Pythonic interfaces. See homepage and demo programs for more details.

Office Tools

  • Microsoft To Do: for task management, Cross-platform (web-based, Windows and mobile apps), free
  • WPS: for MS WORD-like documents, cross-platform (support Linux), free
  • Tex Live and Texstudio for local LaTeX documents writing, cross-platform (Windows, Linux, MacOS), free.

Mathematics Tools

  • IguanaTex: A free LaTeX add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint on Windows. It allows you to insert LaTeX equations into your PowerPoint presentation. Free, and open source.
  • Mathpix: Extract LaTeX from PDFs or handwritten notes in seconds just by taking a screenshot, cross-platform (iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Linux). Free account can support 50 snips/month. installation guide
  • Online LaTeX Equation Editor (CodeCogs): This GUI-based website allows you to create your LaTeX equations from scratch even without any knowledge of LaTeX expressions. LaTeX equations can be exported as multiple image formats like SVG, PNG and PDF.
  • MathType Demo: This site can be used to convert MathType equations to LaTeX or MathML expressions. You can use the GUI on this site to generate your math equations fast.
  • Matrix Calculus: A site that computes vector and matrix derivatives (matrix calculus).
  • SymPy: It is a Python library for symbolic mathematics. Use the website SymPy Live to do symbolic mathematics online. And SymPy Gamma is a SymPy version of WolframAlpha.
  • Matlab Symbolic Math Toolbox: It provides functions for solving, plotting, and manipulating symbolic math equations in Matlab.
  • GENO: A site that can automatically generate optimization solvers in Python. Enter your optimization problem in an easy-to-read modeling language on the website and get the Python codes that can solve the class of optimization problems.

PDF Reader

  • Adobe Acrobat Reader DC: PDF reader, only for Windows or MacOS, free

  • Okular: universal document viewer (PDF, Postscript, DjVu, CHM, XPS, ePub and others), cross-platform (Linux, Windows, MacOS), free, use sudo apt-get install okular for installation in Linux, or follow the guide for installation in Windows. Note that Okular won't save your annotations to PDF file directly by default, instead your annotations are saved in a folder like ~/.kde/share/apps/okular/docdata. You have to manually use Save As and saving as a new PDF file with the annotations, see here for more details.

Diagrams and Flowcharts

  • draw.io: a free online diagram software for making flowcharts, process diagrams, org charts, UML, ER and network diagrams. You can use draw.io with your favourite cloud sharing service (e.g. Google Drive and OneDrive) or on your own device to synchronize your work.
  • Lucidchart: another professional in-browser flowcharts software. It can be used for free under certain restrictions with limited space.
  • mermaid-live-editor for flowcharts and diagrams in markdown

Tables

  • Tables Generator: It is a website-based tool for fast LaTeX, HTML or Markdown tables generation. You can simply copy/paste table data from Excel, a text document, a Markdown code or even a website, or import CSV file or LaTeX code directly. Easy layout configurations.
  • OpenPyXL: It is a Python library to read/write Excel 2010 xlsx/xlsm/xltx/xltm files. Having investigated XlsxWriter, xlrd/xlwt, xlwings and OpenPyXL, and OpenPyXL is the best Python package to work with Excel files from my experience. But ff you are merely working on structured data analysis and have no need of advanced modification on worksheets and cells , try Pandas first.

Academic Writing

  • Linggle 10^12: This is a website where you can get advices on academic writing in English. This tool allows you to find recurring phrases following the words you type, check whether a word is needed in a phrase, decide on alternative phrases or find collocations.
  • ColloCaid: this in-browser tool project aims to develop a text-editing tool to help writers choose words that go well together (i.e. collocations) as needed. Mostly you can just write on this site, or copy and paste your words to the editor and get some advices. Now it's free with a sign-up. But
  • Academic Phrasebank: This website is a general resource for academic writers. It aims to provide you with examples of some of the phraseological 'nuts and bolts' of writing organized according to the main sections of a research paper or dissertation. You can also find links to an enhanced and expanded version in PDF or Kindle format on this website.
  • musi.ai: musi.ai is the world’s first ever English grammar and fluency editor powered by artificial intelligence, created by a group of scientists from UPenn, CMU, UNSW and UC Berkeley. You can use it as a grammar checker before any further changes to your writing. Better experience compared to a free Grammarly account. However, you need to be careful about the changes it makes, such tool is just a machine anyway and sometimes it might misunderstand what you want to say.
  • Turnitin: After you finish your manuscript, it is time to check plagiarism. Turnitin is the most widely used plagiarism checker around the world.

Screenshot, Video Recording and Editing

Recording

  • Kazam: a lightweight screen recorder software in Ubuntu, free. Note that mp4 file generated by Kazam can't be opened correctly in Windows and also on some apps like Slack. For this case, you can use transcoder like HandBrake which is a cross-platform to convert it to selected format.
  • OBS Studio: a powerful software for video recording and live streaming, cross-platform (Windows, Mac or Linux), free and open source. Highly recommended for video recording. There is a known black screen issue in Windows 10 for a computer that has more than one GPU. You can follow the solution to black screen issue to resolve it. But it doesn't have such issue in Ubuntu.
  • ScreenToGif: Screen, webcam and sketchboard recorder with an integrated editor. Free and open source, Over 18 different languages, but only for Windows. You can export as Gif, Video or save as a project to edit later.
  • Peek: a simple animated GIF screen recorder with an easy to use interface for Linux.
  • Snipaste: Snip + Paste = Snipaste, which is a simple but powerful snipping tool, and also allows you to pin the screenshot back onto the screen. It's not fair to consider it as only a snipping tool, actually the most powerful feature of it is to pin multiple screenshots onto the screen in groups! You can convert text or color info in the clipboard into a floating image window. Such windows can be zoomed, rotated, flipped, made translucent, and even made click-through! If you are a programmer, a designer or whoever works much time before the computer, you will be surprised how it can help you get your work done more efficiently! It has the free version for Windows and Mac OS, and also a pro version as in-app purchase in Microsoft Store. Even the free version is powerful enough for everyday use. Linux version is under developing.
  • Flameshot: Powerful yet simple to use screenshot software. It's an equivalent to Snipaste in Linux. Download here.
  • Shutter: a feature-rich screenshot program for Linux based operating systems such as Ubuntu. There are many built-in icons and images in the Shutter editor to reduce your efforts to draw on the screenshot. Install: sudo apt-get install shutter.
  • termtosvg: A Unix terminal recorder written in Python that renders your command line sessions as standalone SVG animations to play in Markdown files and browsers.

Editing

  • FFmpeg is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. Typically you can use it in command lines directly, and also many popular video editors are developed based on FFmpeg.

  • OpenShot: a free & open-source cross-platform video editor. See official guide for more details.

Image Processing

  • inkscape: pro vector graphics editor, cross-platform, free
  • GIMP: image editor, cross-platform, free

Choose colors

There are some tools for guidance in choosing color schemes, which makes your plots more beautiful.

Others

  • PasteMe: This site is intended for use as a short-term exchange of pasted information with others which has more friendly features than Ubuntu pastebin. Support most modern browsers and Internet Explorer 10+. You can set passwords and whether to self-destruct after reading.
  • TimeBie: In-browser time converters among different time zones.
  • KeePassXC: a password manager that can store your passwords safely and auto-type them into your everyday websites and applications, cross-platform (Linux, Windows, MacOS), free, open source.
  • FreeFileSync: a folder comparison and synchronization software that creates and manages backup copies of all your important files., cross-platform (Linux, Windows, MacOS), free, open source.
  • QTTabBar: Extends Explorer by tabs and extra folder views for Windows. Free. See official website (Chinese) for latest update.
  • WizTree: The FASTEST Disk Space Analyser for Windows. Free.
  • Everything: a desktop search utility for Windows that can rapidly find files and folders by name. Free.
  • tesseract.js: Get words in almost any language out of images or videos.