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Mila Wu
Mila Wu

Posted on • Originally published at star-history.com

🔍Underrated Open Source Projects You Should Know About 🧠

For Star History's Feb edition, we were fully inspired by this post discussing underrated open-source projects that deserve more recognition, and we dived DEEP into the threads to see what we were missing out! Here are some of our favorites:

  • Cryptpad
  • Pagefind
  • Paperless-ngx
  • QPDF
  • River

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Cryptpad

CryptPad provides a full-fledged office suite with all the tools necessary for productive collaboration.

When running locally, CryptPad is a powerful application for creating and editing documents. When you use it through a browser, CryptPad is different: it is end-to-end encrypted. No one can access your documents; all your data stays on the device you are using, not even CryptPad administrators can view the content of your files.

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For teams, you can collaborate in real-time with other users. You can share documents via a link with passwords or a certain amount of time, or you can embed your documents using tags

Pagefind

Pagefind is a static search library that aims to perform well on small or large sites, while using as little bandwidth as possible, and you don't have to host any infrastructure.

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Usually, you'd be spinning up your own infrastructure, or signing up for a third-party platform to add search to your website. Pagefind is basically a frontend search library and running the queries inside the users’ browser. And it works with most website frameworks: Hugo, Eleventy, Jekyll, Next, Astro, SvelteKit, etc.

Paperless-ngx

Paperless-ngx is a document management system that transforms your physical documents into a searchable online archive so you can find your physical documents easier. With features such as tags, full text search, multi-user permissions system, this is a dream for those who like to keep an organized folder of files and documents.

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Paperless-ngx is the successor to the original Paperless & Paperless-ng projects, both of which are now in public archive. The original projects are not dead, but rather, continued through the open source community!

QPDF

QPDF is a CLI tool that performs content-preserving transformations on PDF files. We have another tool for managing files!

QPDF's magic begins once you have a valid PDF file:

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What if you have a password-protected PDF and can’t remember the password? It can transform that file in ways that your current PDF tool can’t handle with minimal operations from your CLI.

Beyond encryption and decryption, QPDF can also modify, merge, split, and convert PDF files into different formats.

River

River is a Python library for online machine learning. Online machine learning can dynamically adapt to new patterns in the data, or when the data itself is generated as a function of time, e.g., stock price prediction, content personalization.

River supports different machine learning tasks, including regression, classification, and unsupervised learning. It can also be used for adhoc tasks, such as computing online metrics, as well as concept drift detection.

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River is actually the merger between creme and scikit-multiflow, another great example of open source collaboration and continuation.

Lastly

What do you think? Are there any open-source projects that you have come across that deserve more recognition? Let us know!

Top comments (4)

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michaeltharrington profile image
Michael Tharrington

Just gotta say that I'm loving the aesthetic of Star History.

screenshot from Star History, I've pulled the star history for Forem/Forem

This is so cool lookin! ⭐️

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vincanger profile image
vincanger • Edited

Check out Open SaaS

it's a free, open-source SaaS starter for React, NodeJS, Prisma, Stripe, etc...

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alxwnth profile image
Alex

Nice recommendations, thanks!

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kuzonfyre profile image
Hamilton Hardy

Took me a second to realize that

Lastly

was just the end of the document and not another open source repo