lmemsm

It's fun to discover new lightweight applications. They work well on newer computer systems as well as older or slower computers and low resource machines like many mobile devices. You can run more of them at once. If they're not well-known, they can actually be more secure sometimes (using the security through obscurity principle). I also personally prefer portable applications. That way, you can use the same programs on any operating system. You don't have to relearn new programs for each system you work with.

It can be quite a challenge to find new lightweight applications. I've read several threads on forums where users post their favorite lightweight applications. Many truly are not lightweight by standards that take into consideration memory usage, lines of code, compilation time and/or number of dependencies (libraries).

One way to find lightweight applications is to look for programs built with lightweight GUIs. I've seen a few comparisons of GUI performance. This one is particularly good because it tests the various GUIs and gives statistics:
https://www.pismotek.com/brainout/content/gui-toolkit-resources.php
I was rather surprised by the SDL2 results. Generally, the time it takes to build a GUI from source is one good indication of complexity. FLTK and SDL both build quickly from source compared to the other GUI frameworks mentioned. So, I was surprised that SDL2 scored so badly on the memory usage tests. I'd be curious to know if SDL 1.2.x (which many systems still use) would show a large improvement. Another surprise was how well Tcl/Tk did in the tests. I typically think interpreted languages have worse performance than compiled ones. It would be interesting to see some statistics on response times for similar applications created with these GUIs.

I often go through various source repositories such as Sourceforge, github, etc. looking for code written using specific user interfaces in order to find new and interesting applications. Standard search engines are another way to search for programs. The user interfaces I'm personally most interested in at this point are FLTK, pdcurses/ncurses, SDL and command line programs. These types of applications are typically more lightweight or designed to do one thing well. Know of any other lightweight GUIs or TUIs (text user interfaces)? Please share your recommendations and why you like them.

There are some nice blogs for finding and discussing minimalistic (or in some cases maximalistic) programs. Unfortunately, many are no longer very active. Some favorites are:
https://kmandla.wordpress.com/
https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20160304000554/http://www.jaredandcoralee.com/CLIapps.html
http://macrofig.blogspot.com/

If you know of others, I'd love to hear about them.

One can also look for lightweight distributions and see what programs they have in their repositories or read their forums for more suggestions. Some of the interesting distributions to check are TinyCore Linux (uses several FLTK programs), Nanolinux (uses more interesting FLTK programs), Rogue Class Linux (uses several SDL programs), Puppy Linux, AntiX (Debian based), INX ( http://inx.maincontent.net/ ), Absolute Linux (Slackware based), 4MLinux ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/linux4m/ ), OLPC. Typically DSL and Puppy get mentioned when people list lightweight Open Source systems. There's been no active development on DSL in a long time and the forums are very quiet. I also found Puppy a little too resource intensive on one of my older machines. FreeBSD performed much better on that system. Puppy Linux has some interesting discussions in their forums.

Linux systems that work in framebuffer mode using DirectFB, nano-x and other alternatives also typically contain many interesting, unusual and lightweight applications. Nanolinux and Rogue Class Linux are in this category.

One can also look at operating systems and development projects that use more lightweight C libraries (such as uclibc and musl). Those projects typically gravitate to choosing lightweight applications, command line and console based programs and lightweight tools like Busybox and Toybox.

Alternative operating systems often offer interesting lightweight application choices. Syllable and Haiku often use SDL programs and other lightweight applications that are easier to port to those systems. Systems like Minix and ELKS are also interesting to investigate. Minix 3 uses a lot of the programs that BSD systems do, but earlier versions of Minix include some interesting alternatives. XFDOS includes many interesting FLTK applications. Plan 9 is interesting as well, but not many of the programs used on this system have been ported to other systems. Another good place to look for unusual applications is on mobile devices.
Here are some application lists from Syllable and Agenda:
https://sites.google.com/site/syllablesoftware/
http://agtoys.sourceforge.net/

I'd love to find more places to discuss lightweight applications. If you've written an article on the topic, please share it. If you know of a good blog, forum, mailing list or other resource, please let me know ( http://www.distasis.com/connect.htm ). If you'd like to discuss your favorite C/C++ applications further, you're welcome to check out the mailing list: https://groups.io/g/distasis I had a mailing list on Yahoo Groups called CppDesign, but Yahoo is no longer supporting mailing lists. So, the new list on Groups.io replaces my old lists on Yahoo Groups.