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?"

Lynx?

[saibot834]

Lynx [wikipedia.org], anyone? :)

minimalist

[foodnugget]

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!

AbiWord FTW

[Synesthesiatic]

Back in the day I used to be a huge fan of AbiWord [abisource.com]. It's very lightweight and really does all the most people need from a simple word processor. Reminds me of Word for Windows 2.0, actually. Three years ago I had a friend using it on a Pentium 133 with 16 MB of RAM! I'd take it over OOo Writer any day.

Of course, now I'm on OS X, and the Mac port is fugly, so I haven't touched it in a while.

Putty!

[Prien715]

Putty [greenend.org.uk] is 412 KB for an SSH client that supports window resizing and has no installer! Doesn't hurt that it's open source either.

Foobar

[edelholz]

Foobar2k! Best audio player for Windows ever. http://foobar2000.org/ [foobar2000.org] Quite minimalistic, but highly configurable. Very low memory footprint and plays basically everything.

TinyApps.org

[WillAdams]

http://www.tinyapps.org/ [tinyapps.org]

If you're running Windows, I also like Sumatra PDF

http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/ [kowalczyk.info]

(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

Can't live without

[El Lobo]

Cobian Backup (http://www.cobian.se). An amazingly good and full-featured backup program, which actually, works as a Windows Service, which is unique AFAIK

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.

Foxit

[j.sanchez1]

Foxit Reader [foxitsoftware.com]

Pine, of course

[zifn4b]

Still the best mail client around. :)

Re:Opera

[spyrochaete]

If you use Windows I cannot sufficiently recommend Miranda IM [miranda-im.org]. It's very lightweight (3MB download, 8MB RAM active) multi-IM client. You might call it the Foobar of Windows IM clients. It's got a fantastic community writing plugins and providing support on the official forums. The plugins are really numerous and cool too - Skype APIs, LCD display functionality, log analyzers, IM platform add-ons, out-of-office automators, a Windows uptime util, and hundreds more. It's also got great multinational localizations.

I switched to Miranda from GAIM (which I switched to from Trillian) and I haven't regretted it for one moment. It's very snappy and responsive, it automatically resizes vertically depending on how many contacts are online, it appears and disappears with a single click of the tray icon, it auto-updates the base program as well as the plugins... I could go on and on.

Give it a try. It's free! http://www.miranda-im.org/ [miranda-im.org]

Bloat free

[Firstoni]

IZarc as oposed to Winzip, or WinRAR or ... pretty much any other compression program

Re:MS Paint

[jo7hs2]

I too like MS Paint for simplicity, but I disagree that it is a "bit crap." How many programs for Windows have existed almost unchanged for as long as Windows has existed. The actual workings and features have changed slightly over the years, but the interface is basically the same, and anybody who can turn on the computer can use it. And that's from a Microsoft product! I would suggest that it may be one of the top ten most useful programs ever made, largely because of the simplicity of it.

rTorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

My favourite bittorrent client is rTorrent [rakshasa.no]

"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."

Rockbox.

[maeka]

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.

Xvid vs. DivX

[gc8005]

Xvid download: 628K, simple install DivX download: 22.5MB, loads of crapware, nagging reminders to upgrade, etc.

Well nobody's really chimed in with IM yet

[CaptainPatent]

There was someone above who mentioned Trillian, but by far my favorite pick is Pidgin IM [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!

Re:Weird criteria

[gEvil (beta)]

Seemingly simple tasks like copying music from your hard drive to your mp3 player have to be done in roundabout ways which for some reason involve playlists.

Hmmm. I don't have any playlists in iTunes (I prefer dealing with albums), and I have zero problems with simply dragging an album (or other batch of songs) onto my iPod in the pane on the left. I guess that's too difficult and "roundabout" for some people, though...

Miranda IM

[Arathon]

It's the only IM client that doesn't annoy me anymore. Amazing little program.

A close second would be uTorrent.

uTorrent

[JohnnyBigodes]

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...

Re:My list

[Em Ellel]

Hate to say it but half of that list belongs on the "over-bloated" side. I mean OO??, Firefox??, Thunderbird?? Google Dekstop??? - have you actually used any of those?

I use most of them daily and as much as I love them, calling them anything short of "bloated memory hogs" is flat out lying.

Some examples

[dermoth666]

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.

Re:Foxit

[Oswald]

Seconded! (Thirded, actually). Here is my what's in my Foxit directory:

• FoxitReader.exe.........3696 KB
• Foxit_JS_ExObjects.dll..1981 KB
• fxdecod1.dll..............436 KB
• js.dll......................504 KB
• Uninstall.exe.............80 KB

That's it. I'd like to be able to compare it to Adobe Craprobat, but I've deleted all vestiges of it from my machines. Foxit is quick, small, and stable--all the things Adobe can't manage.

Re:TinyApps.org

[kebes]

Another good listing of smallish software is Portable Apps [portableapps.com]. These are normal (open source) applications that have been fine-tuned to be "portable" so that you can run them off of a USB key for instance (e.g. they store settings locally).

Many of the apps were chosen because they are small and light. Others have been stripped to the minimum, so that they can fit comfortably on removable media (e.g. OpenOffice Portable is 69 MB instead of the usual 100 MB).

The PortableApps Suite is only 89MB and covers all the basics (office suite, browser, email, etc.).

If you're looking for a lightweight app to fill a particular need, it's a good place to start looking.

Opera

[Fëanáro]

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.

Re:uTorrent

[hansamurai]

I used Azureus for a long time, being a Java developer myself I saw it as the app to show off the capability and portability of Java. I stuck with it, the memory footprint and CPU usage was never that bad for me, so I never thought about replacing it. Then I updated my JDK so that I could take advantage of version 6, and boom, Azureus stopped working. I warily downloaded Vuze, but that didn't work either thankfully. So I downloaded uTorrent, and will never look back. It really is a great piece of software, faster and more efficient than Azureus, and basically the exact same functionality and UI.

Re:minimalist

[fbjon]

I would recommend XnView [xnview.com] in the same vein. I prefer it's interface to IrfanView, it's non-bloated freeware and available on a lot of platforms [orange.fr], it can read every image format [orange.fr] under the sun including camera raw files, etc.

Farbrausch

[orbitalia]

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 [farbrausch.de]

Honorable mention: BeOS

[sootman]

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 [google.com] if JLG hadn't been so greedy. [google.com] 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.

Re:uTorrent

[Guspaz]

There's an OSX port in the works (it's been reviewed online). If you can't wait unitil then, you can run uTorrent under WINE. Sure, you get some extra memory bloat, but the CPU and disk footprint should be the same (assuming you already have WINE installed).

Steve Gibson Says "Small is Beautiful"

[loxfinger]

Steve Gibson of SpinRite fame has this page: http://www.grc.com/smgassembly.htm [grc.com]

Of course, he programs directly in assembly in his quest to keep things small and fast.

GIMP tile cache size

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Well nobody's really chimed in with IM yet

[SeaFox]

Miranda [miranda-im.org] is also open source and comes in at 1100KB verses 11MB for Pidgin.

Re:Perl

[Jerry Coffin]

PERL lacking bloat? You've got to be kidding!

If you want minimal, try out UnLambda [madore.org] or Pax [geocities.com]. Unlambda is so minimal the functions (except a few built-ins) don't even get names. As a purely functional language, it also lacks variables. Despite this, it's Turing complete, so it can do anything you can do in such bloated messes as C++, PERL or Python. Pax is also Turing complete, and the page referenced above includes complete source code to its implementation, in a total of 175 lines of code (including white space, nice indenting, etc.)

What's truly sad is that even though it was apparently invented with the specific intent of being obfuscated, Pax programs are generally much more readable than most PERL. Oh, and just to address a couple of your other points: Pax doesn't need a library to do pattern matching -- in fact, the language is basically built entirely around pattern equations. The tutorial and reference manual together work out to just over 200 lines of text. Most of that is the USTL reference manual mentioned above.

Much as I hate to, I have to admit that even compared to PERL, programs in UnLambda are somewhat obfuscated -- though once you get used to its syntax, they're not quite as bad as they initially appear (rather the opposite of PERL in that respect).

Re:Oh!

[ShieldW0lf]

When I'm using Windows, here's my selection:

Utilities:
7-Zip (Compression/Decompression)
Editpad (Tabbed Notepad replacement)
SequoiaView (Creates square treemaps of file system)

Multimedia:
VLC (Plays Anything)
Exact Audio Copy (Perfect CD Ripping)
LAME (High Quality MP3 Compression)
Audacity (Record off Line Inputs or Loopback)

Internet:
uTorrent (Bittorrent)
Firefox with FireFTP (Browswer, FTP)
Thunderbird with WebMail (Email Client)
TortiseSVN (Windows Shell Integration for Subversion)
Putty (Telnet/SSH)

Games:
OpenArena (Open source extension of Quake 3 codebase)
Battle of Wesnoth (Open source strategic fantasy game)

Re:Oh!

[An ominous Cow art]

Other nice un-bloated Windows utilities I'll add:

V, the file viewer [fileviewer.com]
Foxit Reader [foxitsoftware.com] for viewing PDFs
Crimson Editor [crimsoneditor.com] for text files, though I more often use emacs.

Re:Not an "application"

[Anonymous Coward]

I like rxvt, but I REALLY like the one line at a time scrolling feature of aterm (hold shift and hit up/down arrows). aterm is basically rxvt with that and the ability to set backgrounds. I recently switched to urxvt though because it also has the one line scrolling feature and unicode support, which occasionally comes in handy. It's still crazy lightweight. I toyed with urxvtd and urxvtc where all of your rxvt's run in the same process, but because malloc doesn't return memory to the system, when I tested opening a few hundred windows and closing them, urxvtd was then using like 20 MB of ram. I decided he extra memory usage of urxvt was a fair tradoff for getting it back when the program stops using it.

As a side note, I believe you have to compile urxvt yourself to get the scrolling feature. I run Gentoo, so there's a useflag to do this.

Re:Oh!

[metlin]

Speaking of editors, I love Notepad2 [wikipedia.org] on Windows. Lightweight, small memory footprint and extremely well written. Not to mention useful!

And of course, anyone who's had to edit over a slow and bad connection (on *nix) would love pico/nano [wikipedia.org].

Then, back to Windows, there is Irfanview [wikipedia.org] on Windows, which is a fantastic piece of image viewing software. Quite useful.

Finally, I love Safesex [nullsoft.com] by Nullsoft. Other favorites include Winamp (in its traditional UI without the bloatware) and Opera.

In case anyone wonders

[Wolfier]

AD 30 C0: LDA $C030 - loads the content of the address $C030 to the Accumulator. $C030 connects to the beeper line, this line produces a "click" through the speaker.

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.

Re:Putty!

[Anonymous Coward]

The flaw with putty is that it stores your server list in the registry; not a text file in the home directory. Portable apps has a version of putty that stores it as a text file.

http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/putty_portab le [portableapps.com]

Regards

Enlightenment 17

[scottied]

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.

Re:GIMP tile cache size

[Raphael]

Is there a compelling reason that the default behavior is not 80% of your available memory?

There are several reasons, some of which are historical:

• GIMP was designed 10 years ago for UNIX systems. Many of these systems were shared by multiple users from remote displays. On a multi-user system, you do not want any application to consume 80% of the memory shared by all users.
• It is very difficult to have a portable way to know (or even guess) the amount of memory available on a machine. You need different bits of code for each operating system, and sometimes you even have to run external commands and parse their output because a non-privileged application is not allowed to get this information from the system.
• What is "available memory" anyway? It this your total amount of RAM, the amount of RAM still unused after you boot your OS, or what is left after you start your browser and some other applications? In many cases, only the user knows in which context GIMP will be used.
• Nobody bothered implementing good heuristics for setting the tile cache size automatically. I am sure that a patch improving the default behavior would be gladly accepted.

Image processing heavyweights

[fyngyrz]

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.

Re:Foxit

[cerelib]

I use Foxit reader for viewing as well and love it, but I do still keep Adobe Reader around. Why? Foxit still has trouble rendering some PDFs nicely. So I use Adobe Reader when I want to print something and Foxit for my default viewer.

Re:Perl

[Just Some Guy]

Turning that around:

Why do I have to import Regular expression

In Perl, why do I have to load regular expression handling even if I'm not going to use it? What if I want a different type of pattern matching - I have to load both? Python lets you load just what you want.

or Strings in python?

There is almost nothing in "string" anymore except for some constant definitions, which brings us to:

or for that matter, just to get the command line args I have to import a freakin library?

Consistency. Why does Perl have so many special variables in the default namespace? In Python, you don't get what you don't ask for.

mplayer for video (not wmp!)

[ichigo 2.0]

MPlayer [mplayerhq.hu] 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.

Re:Oh!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because much of the stuff behind the Mac OS was in ROM on the old machines.

plugging my favorite text editor

[Xtravar]

Edit Pad Lite http://editpadlite.com/ [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.

Re:Oh!

[SerpentMage]

Not bloatware?? Huh? News to me...

Firefox, Thunderbird, TortiseSVN are anything but Bloat-Free.

In the past six months to a year FireFox, Thunderbird regularly take up 130 MB by themselves. I once had Thunderbird manage RSS feeds.... That was a mistake! And don't even ask me about how SLOW Firefox has gotten with larger HTML pages.

TortiseSVN has this annoying habit that it has to cache everything and if you have any SVN projects of any size it takes ages to do anything.

What annoys me about these applications is that they take the attitude, "oh lets just load it into RAM after all everybody has enough." I get annoyed because I run Virtual Machines and these apps keep slowing everything down.

Re:Vi

[Zathrus]

Some of these wonky new vi's with their fancy colouring and extra modes which coincide with legacy vi commands are evil.

Er, and which ones are those?

I've used vi, nvi, vile, and vim. By far, vim is the most popular (and powerful) of those. And it does not have any modes or commands that coincide with standard vi in compatible mode; there are a few minor differences in non-compatible mode, but nothing that's likely to trip up even seasoned vi-ers (and yes, I used vi for nearly a decade before any of the others, and still use vi from time to time when I get on a box w/o vim).

If you're using vim and don't like color, disable it. In fact, it's disabled by default in compatible mode (which vim defaults to unless you have a .vimrc). If you find the colors "hard to read" then it's because you aren't using a real xterm and vim cannot properly detect your background -- do a :set bg=light or :set bg=dark for a light/dark background and the colors will become much better. Or use one of a few hundred different colorschemes that are available (for anything from 8/16 color standard consoles to 256 color enabled xterms; if you have no color, just :syntax off and go on your way).

vim is a vast improvement over vi -- and not for the coloring, but rather for the buffer management, the filetype capabilities (smarter indenting is the tip of the iceberg), text objects (daB to delete an entire block delimited by {['s is one example; objects exists for words/WORDS, sentences, paragraphs, tags, etc), and macros. There's much, much more, of course, but those are the big ones in my book. I personally don't care much about windows and the vim7 tabs are misnamed and misunderstood, but some love them. I have a strong vi background, and I think the things I mentioned are more relevant to others with a similar background than those other items are.

Re:Oh!

[dannannan]

Zsh, actually

Have a look at ps -eH under your zsh process next time you are in the middle of a ">". It spawns a cat to do its dirty work.

DDL

Re:Oh!

[QMO]

Yeah! They only needed a few hundred K of RAM and disk space because of all the HUGE amount of stuff already stored in the ROM. Gigabytes, at least.

Portable Apps are (usually) Bloat-Free

[Comboman]

Portable Freeware [portablefreeware.com] 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.

Time vs bloat

[FrankHaynes]

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.

Re:Oh!

[empaler]

Morelike the GPLed Notepad++ [sourceforge.net]. Go on, you know you want to! :-)