Here is my list:

• emacs - emacs

• Resizing images: mogrify (part of the imagemagick suite)
• ffmpeg
• pdftk is king for rotating/cropping/appending pdfs
• LaTeX everything
• make/shell - to script/automate image and document editing
• pandoc is reasonably good for many things
• latex2rtf - to get plain text for word counts out of LaTeX source
• wc - word count, line count
• ispell -t - does spell check in the terminal. The -t is so that it’ll mostly ignore LaTeX commands in the source

I’m sure there’s more but I don’t memorize them, they kind of get remembered when I need them.

Rsync for moving files and backing up.

syncthing to sync my files on all my devices

find -exec is essential to process multiple files

7z handles wildcards inside a find -exec so you can save 200 lines of sh compliance

mpv plays online media since it uses yt-dlp

https://github.com/WyattBlue/auto-editor - automatically editing video and audio by analyzing a variety of methods, most notably audio loudness

https://github.com/shssoichiro/oxipng, https://pngquant.org/ and https://github.com/RazrFalcon/svgcleaner for optimizing images

• xournal for fake form-filling on PDFs - ugly and unintuitive but gets the job done
• img2pdf - does what it says on the tin
• ranger for managing files and launching stuff - not the coolest kid on the block but this is the single most impressive terminal app I have used in recent years, the key bindings and commands and defaults are so crazily intuitive that I hardly ever even need to consult the manual

Aria2c is the best downloader for large files. It also supports torrents.

I’d add:

• ghostscript - with some basic perl scripts, works great for pdf flattening/compressing, merging, splitting, adding bookmarks etc.
• poppler - pdfseparate, sometimes pdfunite
• zathura - pdf viewing
• feh - images
• sshfs - prefer it to rclone
• cheat
• emacs - org-mode, latex, dired/wdired, capture, eshell, vterm, tramp
• mc/midnight commander

I use:

• qpdf for mucking around with pdfs, reordering, selecting pages, combining them, etc.
• ffmpeg for video and audio sicing and transcoding. Usually encompassing a command in a script because I forget the precise params every time ;p
• nvim for anything like Markdown (which can be converted to other things like LaTeX or pdf or html, sometimes in multiple stages)
• imagemagick for simple image conversion stuff.
• wget for downloads ^.^
• youtube-dl or yt-dlp for grabbing youtube stuff.

For audio files sox and beets are my live saver.

For me, it’s pretty much just app management via my package manager, some file management, and the big ones are using neovim as a text editor and cmus as my primary music player (I also use emms in emacs sometimes)

Very similar to you. I do use gramma for spellchecking. My most used app overall is probably pandoc. I use it to make all my docs and presentations for work.

• pdfcrop (commonly included with LaTeX) for cropping margins - it cuts the pdf down to its contents then adds a margin of your choosing, extremely useful for forcing academic papers to have consistent margins, pdfcrop --margins 72 *pdf here* will create a document with a ~1in margin all around (it uses bp as its units)
• vips for resizing/converting images - it’s a bit faster and lighter than imagemagick in my experience, although the main reason I use it instead of imagemagick is just because I like playing around with stuff I haven’t used before :) It has an officially supported python binding too

You can also use ghostscript (gs) or the image magick convert with PDF.

I use rsync quite often and ssh as well.