Kate is part of the KDE suite. It has the ability to open several files at once either locally or remotely. With syntax highlighting, project file creation, and external scripts execution, it is a perfect tool for a programmer. Find more information at http://kate.kde.org/.

GEdit is the official text editor of the GNOME desktop. It provides similar features to Kate. Find more information at http://www.gnome.org/projects/gedit/.

GNU Emacs and XEmacs are very professional editors. XEmacs is based on GNU Emacs. To quote the GNU Emacs Manual, “Emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor.” Both offer nearly the same functionality with minor differences. Used by experienced developers, they are highly extensible through the Emacs Lisp language. They support many languages, like Russian, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. Find more information at http://www.xemacs.org/ and http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html.

vim (vi improved) is a program similar to the text editor vi. Users may need time to adjust to vim, because it distinguishes between command mode and insert mode. The basic features are the same as in all text editors. vim offers some unique options, like macro recording, file format detection and conversion, multiple buffers in a screen, and much more. Find more information at http://www.vim.org/ or in our Administration Guide.

GOCR is an OCR (optical character recognition) tool. It converts scanned images of text into text files. It is also one part of Kooka, a KDE scanning tool. Find more information at http://jocr.sourceforge.net/ and in Chapter 17, Kooka—A Scanning Application.

There are plenty of packaging programs for reducing disk usage. In general, they differ only in their pack algorithm. Linux can also handle the packaging formats used on Windows. Find more information about gzip and tar in Section 19.3.1.1, “File Administration”. bzip2 is a bit more efficient than gzip, but needs more time, depending on the pack algorithm.

GNU Parted is a command-line tool for creating, destroying, resizing, checking, and copying partitions and the file systems on them. If you need to create space for new operating systems, use this tool to reorganize disk usage and copy data between different hard disks. Find more information at http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/.

Dar stands for disk archive and is a hardware-independent backup solution. Dar uses catalogs (unlike tar), so it is possible to extract a single file without having to read the whole archive and it is also possible to create incremental backups. There is also a GUI version for KDE available at http://kdar.sourceforge.net. Find more information about dar at http://dar.linux.free.fr/.

Taper is a backup and restore program that provides a friendly user interface to allow backup and restoration of files to and from a tape drive. Alternatively, files can be backed up to archive files. Recursively selected directories are supported. Find more information at http://taper.sourceforge.net/.

The dump package contains both dump and restore. dump examines files in a file system, determines which ones need to be backed up, and copies those files to a specified disk, tape, or other storage medium. The restore command performs the inverse function of dump; it can restore a full backup of a file system. Find more information at http://dump.sourceforge.net/.