Free softwares I use

[Home] []

One of the aims of science is to make science transparent rather than secret, making learning science easy rather than hard. Open-source movements are providing us a free and clean world where we can explore and learn new things and enjoy our learning and working when using computers. Open-source resources equipped with a powerful search engine are transforming the way we learn programming. Using free software instead of proprietary one is a trend in computational physics community. By using open-source softwares, we can do whatever we want to do with our computers. It is not only possible but also efficient and fun to use only free softwares in doing research.

I have been a GNU/Linux user since 2007. This page lists the free softwares I use frequently. These softwares are all open source softwares, most of which are very popular in open-source communities. "Free software has become the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy."

Update: ddd

GNU/Linux operating system

GNU is a Unix-like operating system. For me, GNU/Linux operating system provides a stable, flexible, and highly customizable working platform. The specific GNU/Linux distributions I use are Debian and Ubuntu

Unix users spend a lot of time at the command line.

The command line (often called the console, the shell or the terminal) looks something like this: 




  $ _

When you type in a command like ls, it will give you feedback: 


  $ ls
  Documents README.txt

  $ _

In this case, the ls command listed the files in the current directory.

The following one-line script gives the top 10 commands invoked from my terminal: 

$ history | cut -c8- | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
    997 ls
    887 gnuplot 
    872 make run
    581 make
    540 make clean
    297 cd -
    291 make to_cori
    287 ./p.sh 
    234 cd ..
    144 cd $gemetg
  $ _
When I saw the above top 10 commands, I immediately realized what I was busy with during that period of time (Feb. 2019).

Bash

Bash is the default command-line interpreter for most Linux distributions. While the most frequent use of bash is to provide a command line to execute commands, the most powerful ability of bash is its use as a script language, which makes most of my routine works in Linux automatic and error-free.
[Home] []