PacFinder - A pacman repository & package explorer for Arch Linux
How do I find installed packages.
arch linux - pacman - get list of packages installed by user - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange
Software Engineers, what are your essential pacman packages?
Videos
These work fast on my end
This will give full info of pacman -Qe results. It does pacman -Qi on each line of the pacman -Qe output
for line in "$(pacman -Qqe)"; do pacman -Qi $(echo "$line"); done
This will generate the same output as the loop you made but without doing a pacman search on each line. Uses pipes and perl to format the output of the above command
for line in "$(pacman -Qqe)"; do pacman -Qi $(echo "$line") ; done | perl -pe 's/ +/ /gm' | perl -pe 's/^(Groups +: )(.*)/$1($2)/gm' | perl -0777 -pe 's/^Name : (.*)\nVersion :(.*)\nDescription : ((?!None).*)?(?:.|\n)*?Groups :((?! \(None\)$)( )?.*)?(?:.|\n(?!Name))+/local\/$1$2$4\n $3/gm' | grep -A1 --color -P "^[^\s]+"
Same as above but didn't add "local/" to beginning of each package name
for line in "$(pacman -Qqe)"; do pacman -Qi $(echo "$line") ; done | perl -pe 's/ +/ /gm' | perl -pe 's/^(Groups +: )(.*)/$1($2)/gm' | perl -0777 -pe 's/^Name : (.*)\nVersion :(.*)\nDescription : ((?!None).*)?(?:.|\n)*?Groups :((?! \(None\)$)( )?.*)?(?:.|\n(?!Name))+/$1$2$4\n $3/gm' | grep -A1 --color -P "^[^\s]+"
This command gives the description in the same line.
expac -H M '%-20n\t%10d' $(pacman -Qe)
It is made from some commands found here in the archwiki.
I have created a utility for viewing packages on Arch Linux systems and wanted to share it with anyone who might find it useful.
Introducing PacFinder:
Screenshot
It is a fairly simple GTK desktop application that lets you view all of the packages known to pacman. You can view installed packages or explore packages in the pacman databases. It has filtering for package states (e.g. installed, explicit, dependency, optional) and a basic search mechanism.
Implements libalpm, so it uses the same underlying code as pacman for interacting with the databases.
This is not a package manager or pacman GUI. It is just a front-end for a subset of libalpm features that allow viewing package manager information, not installing or changing things. Databases are opened read-only and it cannot be run as root.
Inspired by pkgbrowser, which I was using when I was trying to clean up my system. But enhanced in a few small ways, and more focused on my usage.
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Install from the AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pacfinder
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Report bugs, suggest features, or make pull requests on GitHub: https://github.com/stevenbenner/pacfinder
Pulling neofetch displays this line: Packages: 916 (pacman), 1 (pkg)
I know how to list the 916 pacman packages but how do I find what this non-pacman package is? I'm not sure what installed it cause I haven't installed anything in a long time and noticed this just today.
Thank you.
Arch Linux doesn't really have a set of default packages, though if you install from the guide you likely installed the base package group, and possibly base-devel. You can use comm to filter these (I'm assuming bash here):
comm -23 <(pacman -Qqett | sort) <(pacman -Qqg base-devel | sort | uniq)
You can use Qqe instead of Qqett if you want to include explicitly-installed packages that are also dependencies of some other package.
simpler solution, that keeps historical order:
grep -i installed /var/log/pacman.log
however you will have upgrades in this list, and it will not contain explicitly installed only
Coming from Ubuntu, I love how minimal and modular Arch is, but I'm awestruck with how many options are available to me.
I want to use Arch as my main development machine and I want to create a stable system from a clean archinstall with systemd, bspwm, pipewire.
These are the packages I installed right after I boot into the system & terminal:
[Services]
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dhcpcd: network connections
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openssh: ssh
[UI]
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lightdm: display manager
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sxhkd: hotkey daemon
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polybar: status bar
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picom: composite manager
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alacritty: terminal
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dmenu: application/script runner
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nitrogen: wallpaper
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zsh, oh-my-zsh: syntax & autosuggestion shell
[Audio]
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pipewire-*: audio handling & headphone jack
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wireplumber, qpwgraph: session management
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pavucontrol: GUI audio settings
[Packages]
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yay: AUR helper
[File Utilities]
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thunar: GUI file manager
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rsync: backup
[Web Browser]
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firefox: yeah
[Development]
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code: VSCode
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python, nodejs, docker, et cetera: programming stuff
I'm planning to setup automatic USB handling for headphones & microphones since that doesn't work for some reason, then media players, then other automated daemons for other stuff.
What other packages or concepts should I look into in order to make my Arch system more reliable as a work machine & daily driver?
Is there a list of recommended software to install in a clean Arch installation with alternatives and explanations? The wiki doesn't suffice and I've been digging through GitHub gists.
