The software listed here is by no means flawless, but at some point I decided it was enough better than the competition to be worthy of mention. In some categories this is because there is virtually no competition to talk about (such as widely unicode-capable terminal emulators), and in others the competition is fierce (such as programmer's editors).
fvwm is an X11 window manager which is extremely flexible and extremely good at getting out of the way so that you, as the user, can get real work done. I have made available some snippets of fvwm config which I use or have had occasion to write for someone else. I make no claims as to their efficacy or usefulness.
jed is a programmer's editor with a variety of friendly emulation modes (I use Emacs emulation, of course) and a tasteful programming language (slang) for extension. Releases 0.99.18 and newer have Unicode support (by way of UTF-8) which is second to none.
mutt is an extraordinarily powerful mailreader which grew out of a sense of dissatisfaction with existing Unix mailreaders. As mutt's original author (Michael Elkins) says, “All mail clients suck. [mutt] just sucks less.” Mutt provides broad support for mail sorting and filtering, as well as encryption, appropriate character set conversion for international mails, a variety of tools for taming verbose mailing lists, and many other features for those of us who are chained to our email.
rxvt-unicode is a modernization of the venerable rxvt X11 terminal emulator with a wide variety of bugfixes and comprehensive Unicode support. It shares all of the benefits of rxvt (minimal resource requirements, speedy operation, reliable and correct emulation) with impressive improvements for editing multinational text.
ical is an old Unix calendaring program written in C++ and Tcl/Tk. It provides many of the features of newer calendaring programs (such as Apple's creation of the same name) in both a lightweight and easy-to-use X11 interface and a rich scripting environment. I have made some modifications to ical, both for correctness and feature extension, as well as written ical scripts. This code is available in the event that anyone should find it useful.
