Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?
I really enjoy using a command-line interface instead of a graphical user interface, and was wondering if anyone had any solid recommendations for applications that one can use in a terminal window.
Tmux: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/
fish-shell: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/
ranger: https://github.com/ranger/ranger/
tig: https://github.com/jonas/tig/
ag or rg: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
And all my configurations, especially for fish-shell: http://github.com/c02y/dotfiles
I love fish-shell, but after years of using it I switched to Oh My ZSH!. The bash compatibility makes it a whole lot easier to use when you're the type of person who has to look up "how to do X on the command line" on the internet more often than you'd like to admit (that would be me).
But the whole reason I use fish is because I DON'T have to look things up on the internet because it uses sane syntax instead of some arcane combination of brackets, symbols, and the word “if” spelled backwards.
fwiw, we are shipping a number of features in fish 3.0 (any day now!) that are specifically targeting at maximizing compatibility with most bash scripts (still not POSIX).
That includes support for && and || and a few other things that should go a long way towards making most code you find drop-in ready.
Really? Doesn't that go against the stated fish design document and ridiculousfish's intention for fish?
I'm more concerned about making fish scripts work well than making fish run bash scripts. (Maybe fish 3.0 will improve that too.) I've tried to use fish for writing somewhat serious scripts several times, and I've always run into frustrating problems that sent me back to bash for scripting. Fish is an excellent interactive shell, of course.
You can see the discussions on GitHub but @ridiculousfish authored that series of commits fwiw.
However with regards to your other matter, I personally just finished rewriting the job control code to close out a lot of long standing bugs affecting correctness and child process behavior in complicated scripting cases, and other members like @faho have done an amazing job fixing up some of the builtins and scripting-related improvements as well as putting in insane effort into the interactive behavior of the shell and its insane library of completions.
Try the current fish master builds and see how if fares. If you have any specific concerns, please file a GitHub issue. It’s an open source project and it can only succeed with the help of the entire community.
fwiw I find the sanity fish brings to process substitution with sane tokenization and automatic escaping of shell substitution output to be a huge boon to productivity over writing in (ba)sh. These days, my scripts are either written in ninja or bmake if they are rule/output driven or fish otherwise.
Thanks for the updates. I have contributed to related discussions on GitHub for several years, but I haven't been able to keep up with all the issues.
> fwiw I find the sanity fish brings to process substitution with sane tokenization and automatic escaping of shell substitution output to be a huge boon to productivity over writing in (ba)sh.
I completely agree, this is why I would much prefer to use fish for scripting when feasible. I'm glad to hear that the scripting is being improved.
I like using a different plugin manager with OMZ. https://github.com/tarjoilija/zgen
If you use a lot of addons, this can load up prompts faster without losing any OMZ goodness.
I also love zgen and used to use some parts of OMZ with it. But after debugging weird issues a bunch of times and always finding a funny opinionated config in OMZ I changed everything to Prezto. Zgen supports Prezto natively.
FWIW, here's my .zshrc. https://github.com/dancek/dotfiles/blob/master/.zshrc
A quick tip for anyone disparaging the compatibility of fish shell, since this has solved most of the interior concerns for me:
# Bash: FOO=bar ./command # Equivalent in bash and fish: env FOO=bar ./commandhave you tried https://github.com/oh-my-fish/oh-my-fish ? has been serving me well for years
It's mainly the bash compatibility - does Oh My Fish fix that problem?
that would rather defeat the point, since fish breaks compatibility by design, that's part of what i like about it.
i can however appreciate that breaking bash compatibility is not for everyone.
i mix use of bash and fish. but more often than not i find myself in a situation where i switch to fish because it makes some complex command easier, than the reverse.
greetings, eMBee.
There are a few plugins you can use with oh-my-fish and similar tools, for example `fish-foreign-env`, which provide a command (`fenv`, in this case) which runs a given command in bash and then transfers environment variable changes to the fish environment from which it was called.
It's not bash compatibility, but it is good enough for one-offs and even for many scripts and tools that expect to be sourced in your dotfiles from bash.
The bass plugin[1] works well.
I'm in the same boat as you. Also used Fish for several years and loved it, but there's some incompatibilities here and there (dont remember exactly what, I think it was difference in how to pipe streams vs bash/zsh). In the end i switched to zsh & oh-my-zsh and haven't run into issues since (made the switch maybe 6 years ago). I'm a heavy terminal user so this part I'm not experimenting with again.
Same except using zplug.
I still use fish for scripting as its syntax is far more casual looking.
Great list. I recently switched from ranger to nnn and have been really happy. It's tiny and extremely fast:
Really happy to see tig in your list and so high in the list of comments. Definitely one of my favorites too.
A few of the ones I use almost daily
- Pandoc a handy document format converter: https://pandoc.org/ - Ripgrep, a faster grep: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep - There are quite a few prompt-toolkit based CLI which have been really nice: * mycli (https://github.com/dbcli/mycli), pgcli (https://github.com/dbcli/pgcli) * ptpython/ptipython (https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/ptpython) - Youtube-dl: http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ - fzf a fuzzy finder for the console: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf - jq for JSON manipulation: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ - Miller for CSV/TSV: https://github.com/johnkerl/miller
I would imagine you have already scoured the "awesome" lists: https://github.com/agarrharr/awesome-cli-apps#terminal-utili...
Wow. mycli and pgcli are so good!
It is. Omitting the semi colon to execute a statement alone feels good.
ptpython seems really useful, thank you! I was frustrated with the limited capabilities of the vanilla python REPL.
Another awesome list with some command line apps: https://github.com/alebcay/awesome-shell#applications
Thank you so much for posting that list, somehow it slipped under my radar. Great suggestions!
Just about every Rust cli app written by sharkdp:
https://github.com/sharkdp/fd
https://github.com/sharkdp/bat
https://github.com/sharkdp/diskus
https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine
CLI utilities from jarun for daily use:
The developer (https://github.com/jarun) writes cmdline utilities only. His tools are highly optimized for performance and integrates seamlessly with the DE. Most of them are available on popular distros and Homebrew.File manager: https://github.com/jarun/nnn Google search: https://github.com/jarun/googler DuckDuckGo search: https://github.com/jarun/ddgr Bookmark manager: https://github.com/jarun/Buku Multicore resize & rotate: https://github.com/jarun/imgp Calculator: https://github.com/jarun/bcal Date diff and timers: https://github.com/jarun/pdd Kernel keylogger: https://github.com/jarun/keysnifferSince @sharkdp's work was originally inspired by @burntsushi's rg, you might be interested in xsv for CSV viewing (and manipulation): https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv
| For viewing csv's as tabular
I use peco for this https://github.com/peco/peco , thanks for sharkdp checking those out.
How are you using peco to view csv's?
I might be revealing my lack of experience here, but why would you need an app to view your csv? What is the benefit of this over running the data frame or df.head?
Visidata is much more than a simple CSV viewer. It can open xls/xlsx/sas7bdat/spss files, and allows you to quickly edit the in-memory copy of the table using Vim-like keyboard shortcuts. It also allows you to create plots using Braille Unicode symbols. It's a great tool!
Thank you so much for sharing this with me. Life changer!
Thanks for sharing! Will check it out.
fd is awesome so I have to check the others out too. Thanks for the tip!
Ngrok - https://ngrok.com
So easy and super convienient if you quickly need your local server accessible from somewhere else.
This one is even easier because it doesn't require to install anything, just make a good old ssh tunnel: http://localhost.run
The thing I really love about ngrok, though, is the web dashboard where you can inspect your tunnelled traffic and even replay requests: https://ngrok.com/docs#inspect
Oh, looks like you can get a consistent sub-domain too, provided it's unique enough. Nice.
I found https://serveo.net as a good alternative to ngrok since it requires no signup, no installation and provides a custom subdomain for free.
<3 ngrok. been paying (love reserved names) for a while now.
for a self hosted option, I've also been using https://github.com/fatedier/frp lately.
I keep a VPS running with Nginx on it for a specific port. Then I forward that port via SSH using remote forwarding to enable this exact functionality. It's free if you've already got a server running.
ngrok is free even if you don't have a server running... and you can tunnel raw TCP.
(not affiliated, I just really admire ngrok so I take it personally when people don't use it :))
god, I had this same idea and thought about making it! I'm so glad you shared this, I had no idea someone else already did it! and did a great job with it, too, by the looks of it
Nice question!
Here my personal setting:
- Email : mutt [http://www.mutt.org/]
- Passwords manager : pass [https://www.passwordstore.org/]
- Navigate directories : autojump [https://github.com/wting/autojump]
- Task manager : task [https://taskwarrior.org/]
- Music : cmus [https://cmus.github.io/]
- Text editor : emacs -nw [https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/]
Excuse my very basic question, but how do you manage spam when using mutt? Do you interface to a cloud-based service in mutt, or have some kind of other spam filter?
I’ve always liked the idea of moving my email to mutt and using personal domains, but not convinced I could manage spam well.
the same way you manage it with a GUI mail client. if you use a mailservice that includes a spam-filter, you can use mutt's imap support to access it, and thus access the filtered mailbox like any GUI or webmail client would.
for your own personal domain, either use a service that supports personalization. (gmail does, but there should be others) and you are covered again.
if you want to host your own mail server, then you'll probably want to run your own spam filter on that server. it works by having the mail server forward the mail to the filter (which can be local or remote) and then deal with the mail based on the response from the service.
greetings, eMBee.
there was a recent HN thread announcing the resurrection of Apache's Spam Assassin. the comments may provide some useful suggestions to you.
Amusingly, you can actually do all of that within emacs:
- email: notmuch/Rmail/Gnus/&c.
- password manager: pass.el (uses pass under the covers)
- navigate directories: shell or eshell, with autocompletion and/or Helm
- task management: Org Mode
- music: emms
Emacs is crazy-powerful!
dired-mode by itself is pretty excellent for navigating directories.
A few of these (all?) are TUIs and not CLIs.
CLIs are command driven. TUIs are driven by user interactions. I'm sure more/better distinctions between the two can be made.
that's a fair point, but i don't think that's what the OP meant. CLI is commonly used to cover TUI when pittet against GUI.
greetings, eMBee.
On one hand it's in the acronym command line interface and on the other
"was wondering if anyone had any solid recommendations for applications that one can use in a terminal window" it really looks like he meant to express console apps not cli I think you are correct.
I don't believe that's true. TUI has more in common with GUI than CLI.
I bet you five dollars OP was looking for TUI programs as well.
sure, conceptually it does, but that's not the point.
what matters for most is the fact that i can run the application in a text only terminal, on any machine (remote or local), from any device (be it linux, windows, mac or even a mobile phone (ok, that's rarely practical, but it's possible))
a GUI does not offer that advantage.
greetings, eMBee.
> what matters for most is the fact that i can run the application in a text only terminal, on any machine (remote or local), from any device (be it linux, windows, mac or even a mobile phone (ok, that's rarely practical, but it's possible))
> a GUI does not offer that advantage
Sure, not in the terminal, but X forwarding is a thing and works on every system I've had to use it on.
it doesn't work on the majority of systems i have to work with, which is servers that don't have the necessary tools installed.
it's also very susceptible to latency and most applications don't handle slow connections in a usable manner. (they are designed with the expectation that the gui always responds instantly)
to get something of a tmux/screen like experience, xpra is available, which is an awesome piece of work, but it doesn't help with the latency. even over just local wifi i have some applications become unusable over xpra when they work ok over plain remote X.
the problem is not necessarily X but in part GUI in general. i can't click the mouse anywhere until the respective UI item is visible, so i have to wait for that.
on a commandline on the other hand in most cases i can keep typing even on extremely slow connections because i can anticipate what will happen and i know what keys are appropriate to type next.
using mosh i even get something like editable typeahead which is a marvel and very hard to imagine on X.
greetings, eMBee.
Oh, I never said I _enjoyed_ X forwarding, or even use it frequently. My point was just that remote access in a similar way to a shell is possible with a GUI, and could be made even better if X had a means of not having to draw everything but left it up to the toolkit on the other end.
But yes, in general, a shell is just much better:)
> could be made even better if X had a means of not having to draw everything but left it up to the toolkit on the other end
that a thousand times!
does wayland work in that direction?
I wish more people made the distinction and more people made TUIs too...
Scoop - https://scoop.sh
It's basically apt/brew on Windows, but it's particularly awesome because it does not manage dependencies. It just downloads and extracts installers, which works because every self-respecting program that works on Windows distributes binaries as an installer (or just a zip) somewhere. Result: everything just works, every program is self-contained, no admin rights needed, no package maintainers needed either.
So far I've been using Chocolatey (https://chocolatey.org) for doing this (and ninite though that's not command line). But this looks pretty cool too. Thanks for sharing!
I created a small CLI tool that I package for Homebrew, Snap, Docker, Chocolatey and Scoop, and I prefer the packaging experience for Scoop, which is the most easy and straightforward one.
Compare the respective directories in https://github.com/philippgille/serve.
Nice tool btw! I wish I'd known about it 5 days ago, when I taught a class that involved a little bit of web development. I used devd, but getting it in the PATH was a non trivial task for some of the trainees who used Windows. Serve has an installer, which presumably solves that even without scoop or chocolatey.
Yeah I used chocolatey for a while too, but I found it needlessly overengineered, and often the abstraction was leaky. Scoop is dumber, in a good way.
> no admin rights needed,
> Make sure Powershell 3 (or later) and .NET Framework 4.5 (or later) are installed.
Yeah not exactly. Wouldn't work in most ( all ? ) the places I worked at.
Really? PS 3.0 was integrated as of Win 8 / Server 2012. In 7 and 2008/2008R2 it was in service pack 1.
Yes it is installed. But script execution is pretty much always disabled through group policy
Not to mention if you work at a university that does any research, you more than likely support computers still running Windows 98, or even older!
It is shocking how much equipment gets drivers and then never gets updated and no one has the time or money to update them..
Cli-junkie brofist! I only drop out of the command line for occasional one-off browser stuff.
Depending on your current familiarity with things, I can't recommend enough simply combing through the tools in coreutils, util-linux, find-utils etc. If you take just three or so a day, by the end of a few months you'll have a solid survey-understanding of what almost every *nix shell has available.
Apart from that, here are some I use and enjoy:
[0]:http://abook.sourceforge.net/ -- Vintage address book; Plays well with mutt
[1]:http://git-annex.branchable.com -- A better Dropbox, and via git!
[2]:https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/ -- Index and search the contents and metadata of (pdf, word, etc) documents
[3]:https://www.roaringpenguin.com/products/remind -- Vintage and sophisticated tool for doing calendrical stuff.
[4]:https://github.com/trizen/youtube-viewer -- CLI YouTube with all the bells and whistles!
[5]:https://6xq.net/pianobar/ -- Pandora radio!
> git-annex is not a filesystem or Dropbox clone. However, the git-annex assistant is addressing some of the same needs in its own unique ways. (There is also a FUSE filesystem built on top of git-annex, called ShareBox.)
So I assume you made it work like Dropbox for you anyway. How did that go?
The "a better Dropbox" comment was quite tongue in cheek. You can think of git-annex as a way of managing files in git without managing the contents, which is exactly what we want for binary blobs like PDFs, word documents, whatever.
The syncronization between computers is done essentially how one would do it with git. Personally, I sync to a private VM host so the content is available "in the cloud".
At the moment I just sycn everything manually, but it's possible to setup git-hooks to make it automatic. git-annex is nice for power users, since it allows fine grained control of where to keep what content. The file metadata is stored in git, but you choose when and how to pull or push the actual files themselves.
That makes it possible to sync cross sections of an entire library, for example. This is how I manage what to put on my kindle and what to keep off it.
There is git-annex assistant. I ended up going back to manual synchronizing, but it is promising as more of a drop-in replacement for DB.
Try googler and you can browse from the command line.
If you like that, then you might like surfraw[0].
The main problem is that these don't really obviate the need for a browser, they just make it easier to open said browser tab from the command line.
In order to load browser bookmarks from the command-line, I use this shell script:
You will need to modify it for your use, such as by changing the filenames. I also made another shell script to load Wikipedia.#!/bin/bash -- f0() { echo 'select moz_bookmarks.title || '"'"' = '"'"' || url from moz_places, moz_bookmarks on moz_places.id = moz_bookmarks.fk where parent = 2;' | sqlite3 /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/twht79zd.default/places.sqlite } f1() { firefox `echo 'select url from moz_places, moz_bookmarks on moz_places.id = moz_bookmarks.fk where moz_bookmarks.title = '"'$1'"';' | sqlite3 /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/twht79zd.default/places.sqlite` } f$# $1However, is also my opinion making many thing which do not need a web browser and can just be the command-line programs.
Tmux: https://github.com/tmux/tmux/
ts: http://vicerveza.homeunix.net/~viric/soft/ts/ (TaskSpooler) queue commands in different terminals
socat: http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/ -- Multi-purpose relay
most: http://www.jedsoft.org/most/ pager more features than less/more
sshfs: https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs remote filesystem using SFTP via FUSE
passgo: https://github.com/ejcx/passgo Simple golang password manager
rclone: https://github.com/ncw/rclone rsync for cloud storage
autosub: https://github.com/agermanidis/autosub Command-line utility for auto-generating subtitles for any video file
If you want more complete cloud backup, try restic or duplicacy which have encryption, dedup and retention policy.
Also, I found borg better than restic since borg also does compression
The author is willing to add compression to restic but that was in March and no ETA.
Thanks - I'm subbed to that ticket. Will most likely switch over when it's done since a I vastly prefer a single binary rather than having to install python + deps.
Finally, someone who posted socat. Endlessly useful for doing a mitm of a connection for debugging. Paired with tpcdump, you can view _anything_
Ahh, socat, the zombo.com of the networking world.
Takes a log time to digest the man page, but once you have you can do anything.
Intrigued by autosub, is it better than Youtube's auto-captions ?
It relies on Google’s translation API in GCP which isn’t free but does have a trial period. I assume YouTube would also rely on this service internally for auto captions.
Some great contributions here ... some that are missing (or at least scarce) which deserve more attention:
units - for a broad range of conversions without having to resort to Wolfram Alpha or a search engine
bc -l - the -l option really empowers this awesome little calculator.
mpv - awesome media player - point it at a media URL (it uses youtube-dl in the background, so perfect for viewing or listening with no ads,) but can also play from open directories / SMB shares, online radio, Play a series of images as video, Access any FFmpeg/Libav libavformat protocol or filter (including generating tones and images, and more. And once it's playing, has great interactive keyboard controls for many useful functions.
>Some great contributions here ...
Agreed.
>bc -l - the -l option really empowers this awesome little calculator.
Right. Since bc is a Unix filter, you can also pipe expressions into it, to be evaluated, so it can be used in general Unix pipelines. E.g.:
and the output comes on stdout, so it can be further piped.echo *arithmetic_expression* | bc -lEdit: You have to quote any shell special characters in arithmetic_expression with single quotes, or better, just enclose the entire arithmetic_expression in single quotes. If asterisk (for multiplication) is not quoted, for example, it will be treated as a filename wildcard instead, and likely lead to an error. A wrong and a right example:
$ echo 2 + 3 * 4 | bc -l (standard_in) 1: syntax error $ echo '2 + 3 * 4' | bc -l 14
For working on servers, tmux + mosh is a killer combination: mosh makes your connection resilient to network issues and tmux gives you (back) scrollback and cross-session persistence.
mutt is hard to beat as an email client and circe (an emacs package) + znc on a digital ocean instance or equivalent makes for a great persistent irc session.
Mosh also makes it possible to have an ssh client running on a mobile device and still use the mobile device as a mobile.
Another vote for tmux + mosh combo.
youtube_dl an ffmpeg would be my top two in terms of power.
Here are my top commands by frequency of use:
4421 git
952 open
936 vim
908 cd
603 ls
566 grep
533 cp
429 rm
414 mv
250 atom
247 pip
233 mkdir
223 fab
163 docker
130 touch
128 find
123 youtube-dl
113 python
103 ssh
100 cat
99 wget
81 pytest
75 brew
I use git so much that I made these aliases in zsh:
A few hundred instances of "gs" in my .zhistory :)alias g="git show" alias gh="git show HEAD" alias gs="git status" alias gl="git log" alias gco="git checkout" alias gd="git diff" alias gbl="git branch -v" alias gbd="git branch -D" alias gri="git rebase --interactive" alias grc="git rebase --continue" alias gra="git rebase --abort" alias gst="git stash" alias gsta="git stash apply" alias gx="gco -- \*; git reset HEAD \*" alias gcp="git cherry-pick" alias gcpc="git cherry-pick --continue" alias gcpa="git cherry-pick --abort"I find my git graph, git save, and git lint (also, git fetch --prune but lo alias for that one) extremely useful.
Aliases in my ~/.gitconfig:
[alias] co = checkout cm = !git add -A && git commit br = branch ci = commit st = status unstage = reset HEAD -- recent = for-each-ref --count=10 --sort=-committerdate refs/heads/ --format="%(refname:short)" overview = log --all --oneline --no-merges recap = !git log --all --oneline --no-merges --author=${1-$(git config user.email)} today = !git log --all --since=00:00:00 --oneline --no-merges --author=${1-$(git config user.email)} changelog = !git log --oneline --no-merges ${1-$(git describe --abbrev=0)}..HEAD upstream = !git log --oneline --no-merges HEAD..${1-$(git branch -lvv | perl -ne '/^\\*.*\\[(.*?)\\]/ and print "$1\n"')} local = !git log --oneline --no-merges ${1-$(git branch -lvv | perl -ne '/^\\*.*\\[(.*?)\\]/ and print "$1\n"')}..HEAD graph = log --oneline --graph --all --decorate --date=iso save = !git add -A && git commit -m 'SAVEPOINT' undo = reset HEAD~1 --mixed backup = !git push origin/backup/$(whoami)/$(git branch) lint = !git branch --merged | grep -v \"^\\s*master$\" | grep -v \"\\*\" | xargs -n 1 git branch -dThanks for the tip.. :)
I’ve been using short aliases for my most frequently used git commands for a few years now. I can’t imagine not using aliases.
Having these aliases of mine makes these actions something that you don’t need to spend any mental effort to perform at all.alias st='git status' alias dp='git diff' alias di='git diff --cached' alias aa='git add -A' alias cm='git commit -m' alias pu='git push'I highly recommend others to define aliases that make sense to them for the most used got commands.
Mine are named the way they are because the two letter alias represents how I think of the action that the command performs:
* st - status
* dp - diff pending
* di - diff
* aa - add all
* cm - commit
If you define your aliases this way (speaking to the other readers of this thread, not the person I am replying to), you will find that the combinations become muscle memory quickly.
Notice also that unlike a lot of other people including the person I am replying to, my aliases are not prefixed with “g”. Again this boils down to your personal way of thinking. I’ve used other version control systems before, switched to git several years ago, and use git pretty much exclusively. I am of course aware at all times that I am working with git, but at the same time when I think of actions to perform, I don’t think of them as “git this or that”, I only think of the “this or that” part. If that makes sense :P
But yeah, find aliases that work and make sense for you.
The oh-my-zsh git plugin [1] aliases have become second nature.
No need to install oh-my-zsh you can just take the file or cherry pick (!) the useful ones.
I may drop oh-my-zsh completely and just set up zsh with the small subset of plugins I use.
[1] https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/tree/master/plugin...
nice ones! couple from my bash_alias
alias ..="cd .." alias ..2="cd ../.." # ... you get the idea, mine goes up to 5 function mkcd () { mkdir -p "$@" && eval cd "\"\$$#\""; } alias h="history|grep"Instead of your `..` aliases, I have this, which saves some copy-pasting.
function up() { cd "$(printf '../'%.0s $(seq 1 "${1:-1}"))" && pwd; } #up 4 goes up 4 directoriesalias ...="cd ../.." alias ....="cd ../../.."
SCM Breeze has aliases like that, plus a bunch of other convenient things like numbered shortcuts for branches and files: https://github.com/scmbreeze/scm_breeze
I use of few of these as well as alias stage="git add -A && git status" alias unstage="git reset HEAD && git status"
I find that...
...comes in handy as well, and it's fun to type.alias glol="git log --oneline"Try this one sometime...
alias lg = log --date=format:'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S' --pretty=format:'%cd %<(20,trunc)%an %C(auto)%h%Creset%C(auto)%d%Creset %s'
hahah I have gs and gb(branch), just because I'm just constantly typing them(sometimes for no reason at all), others I end up typing the full commands tho
gitsh - https://github.com/thoughtbot/gitsh
Since git is by far the command a lot of people type the most, this shell comes in really handy. It supports all regular git aliases, has autocompletion, and you can set default commands to be run when you just press return. It's amazing how much typing it saves.
+1 to Gitsh. Feels like it saves a massive amount of typing.
rg (ripgrep): https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
I used to use ag (the silver searcher) [1] before, and `ag` was practically a muscle memory to me, but then I came across ripgrep and it was so much faster. I've now installed a static binary of ripgrep in every machine I have SSH access to.
Note that rg and ag don't have the same feature sets. Here's a handy chart that shows the differences.
That chart is now quite out of date. I don't think there are any substantial features present in ag that are absent from rg. See my note in the README: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep#feature-comparison
Please let me know what's new so that I can update the chart. Dumping into an issue will do, and then I can worry about getting it into chart format.
The first time i use it, I was in shock about how fast ripgrep is. Amazing.
I use the following (in no particular order) -- definitely nothing fancy.
* weechat
* ffmpeg
* youtube-dl
* zsh
* watchman (https://facebook.github.io/watchman)
* megadl (rarely, but its a handy tool when you need it)
* brew (on my mac)
* mountsshfs (on my mac)
---
I moved away from orgmode and have been using it in VS since I have it open anyway. It covers me.
I also want to start using Mutt or something similar.
For those wondering, you can output an unnecessarily pretty list using:
history | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f3 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail | perl -lane 'print $F[1], "\t", $F[0], " ", "" x ($F[0] / 12)'There's a Firefox extension that let's you open a youtube webpage with e.g. youtube-dl:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-with/
Sometimes, using a GUI is easier than a CLI :)
This doesn't look to take commands after a pipe into account so IMHO doesn't accurately reflect command usage. For example running above I was surprised awk wasn't in the list but when I went to investigate I found I almost always am piping something to awk.
Hmm yeah. And often I type multiple commands separated by semicolons, which it bunches together as one. Also that and long paths meant mine was very unpretty. Speaking of AWK, this uses the same flawed method, looks nicer (for my history), and is shorter:
history | awk '{a[$2]++} END{for (i in a) print a[i]"\t"i}' | sort -n | tail
Just for curiosity: you have moved away from Emacs org-mode? If yes may I ask why?
I'm using Emacs since few times and it's now even my WM and org-mode is it's companion for nearly all docs/docs related stuff I use, never found anything even near comfortable and powerful as that combo...
yeah, I've never been a big emacs user outside of org-mode, so it was silly for me to be using it for one feature.
The VS one covers the basics and has treated me well. For more advanced org-mode folks, I don't think the VS org-mode would be enough.
Thanks, just curious because you are the first I here that have used Emacs and decide for something else.
For org-mode outside Emacs I do not know VSc but I've used in the past Vim port and agree: outside Emacs org-mode support is simply too limited to be considered...
its generous for me to say I'm an org-mode power user or whatever. My lists are fairly basic and this VSC one covers those basics.
I can't see a lot of people who use emacs for other things switching away.
This is the one I'm using --
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tootone....
This is an abbreviated list of my command-line applications, taken from the Nixpkgs overlay I use for configuring macOS, NixOS, and non-NixOS Linux:
pxc.common.tui.pkgs = with self.pkgs; [
# cli basics
htop # top, but nicer
httpie # curl, but much nicer except for lacking a man-page (--help is very complete)
ranger # file manager
ripgrep # my favorite grep alternative/replacement
tree # prints directory trees
# stuff my fish config uses and some goodies I want
fish # very nice shell, replaces bash
grc # GNU regular colorizer: uses regular expressions to colorize the terminal
tmux # terminal multiplexer (tiling window manager for the terminal)
byobu # some tmux config that makes things a little nicer. Great for new tmux users, hardly used anymore
fzf # fuzzy filtering: used for changing directories, selecting files to open, browsing shell history
fasd # frecency tools: jump to directories, open files, etc., based on fuzzy matches sorted by frecency
keychain # simplified SSH and GPG key loading/management
direnv # barebones projects, pretty nifty
gitAndTools.hub # GitHub CLI extensions for Git
gitAndTools.tig # curses TUI for browsing git logs
# makes tmux pretty with `powerline-config tmux setup`
pythonPackages.powerline
findutils # macOS comes with weak find command
gawk # macOS comes with ancient gawk, tmux-fingers wants a newer one
pass # GPG+git-based CLI password manager
pwgen # for use with pass
p7zip # archiving tool that can do pretty much everything
# chat
weechat # nice terminal-based IRC app
### extras-ish ###
mediainfo # tell me things about multimedia files
asciinema # record TTY/terminal sessions (with audio) as moving text for the browser
cowsay
graphicsmagick # image manipulation. lots of fun for quickly uploading custom emoji to Slack
];I've been digging ncdu recently, which is basically a du replacement: https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu
Not as nice as ncdu, but if you have to work with what's already installed:
du -k --max-depth=2 * | sort -rn | head
Ymmv, but playing around with max-depth is usually enough to find the culprit for me.
recently created an alias;
ncdu='ncdu --color dark -q'
-q for quiet, slows updating the ncurses interface down for a quicker scan.
also; -1 for scan info pre ncurses display and -0 for no scan info.
Ncdu is really useful for identifying space hogs.
+1. Really really handy.
Music organizer/player http://beets.io
File browser https://github.com/ranger/ranger
Emacs - It does anything you want.
Emacs If you like vim keys bindings - http://spacemacs.org
Terminal multiplexer - Tmux
Beets is really great, before switching mainly to streaming I used it every day to tag new additions to my library.
Another alternative to Emacs with vim keybindings is Doom Emacs. It's superior to Spacemacs imo.
I've been using Spacemacs for a while, what sets Doom Emacs apart?
I am a convert from Spacemacs to Doom, and I have found that one of the main differences that sets Doom apart is easier configurability than Spacemacs. In Doom, there is still the concept of "layers," but IMO it is much easier to figure out what the layers are doing and customize them from there.
Also, I have found Doom to be much quicker (takes about 2 seconds to load, not using server/client) and less buggy than Spacemacs. I would highly recommend giving Doom a try!
This. Also, the developer is responsive on his Discord server should you have any issues with the editor. Henrik is patient, kind and reliable, rare traits for open source projects these days.
I completely agree, I have had a very similar experience with Henrik.
Aria2: https://github.com/aria2/aria2 an excellent download manager. Supports many functionalities such as downloading torrents, multi-connection downloads, and resuming uncompleted downloads. It also support RPC calls which enables it to be an excellent download manager back-end.
I saw Aria2 has two packages in F-driod. I installed them and looked at the docs but I couldn't figure out how to download stuffs with Aria2. A small example of it's use will be highly appreciated. Thank you.
you need both. One of them pnly supplies a UI, while the other only supplies the binary. I personally recommend running aria2c via termux and using ziahamza.github.io/webui-aria2
I became addicted to these great tools all written in Rust:
fselect - https://github.com/jhspetersson/fselect
ripgrep - https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
exa - https://the.exa.website
They are the replacements for traditional find, grep, and ls.
I suspect you'd also enjoy fd - https://github.com/sharkdp/fd
exa looks pretty slick, except for having the keys required be on the two weakest fingers of my left hand. :-(
vim
It's really worth the time to learn. It's pre-installed basically everywhere, it's amazingly useful. It has the features of a modern text editor all in a command line.
Vim is an interactive application.
So are Midnight Commander, ranger, Mutt, tig, htop, emacs and many of the other great programs mentioned here.
I've taken this list to be of thing things that run in a terminal rather than strictly non-interactive programs.
so is less
Both are not command line tools, imho.
I use vim exclusively, and use a terminal for most things.
FZF - fuzzy file finding lightning quick, I use this as a ctrl+p replacement in vim too. Kubectx - Supported by FZF. Quickly change k8s context and define namespaces easily too (Kubens)
There are so many to list that I'll skip the more obvious ones (they're well represented in the comments) and pick a few that I've been enjoying a lot lately:
Netflix-Skunkworks/go-jira[0] - Jira interface written in Go that is incredibly flexible.
bat[1] - cat with code highlighting
climate[2] - Shell swiss-army knife of tools
That last one deserves a post on its own. It's certainly not the most portable thing -- requiring that certain binaries be available for some of its functions, but it works as-is for the Linux distributions that I run and provide simple commands for getting information about things that isn't always trivial to remember (such as getting an external IP address of a host from the command-line). Silly things like remembering the CLI options for 'du' (along with the necessary '| sort ... | head -5') are replaced by 'climate biggest-files'. It replaces a mess of tools, but does so, often, by simply calling those tools with the "correct" parameters that I've forgotten.
Yes, a well authored set of aliases for the most common commands would do the same thing, but I end up using 'climate' in cases where the information I need is something I rarely need for a given task and getting that information is going to be a non-obvious exercise involving a few pipes. It's a "kitchen sink" utility with a set of commands that, for the most part, you'd find a hard time grouping them into a single theme -- a command for getting the current weather (after all, it is named climate) next to one to download all files on a web page, next to one to get disk usage stats in a variety of ways. Normally, I don't like tools like this, but this one lands as a big exception to that rule for me.
[0] https://github.com/Netflix-Skunkworks/go-jira
> such as getting an external IP address of a host from the command-line.
What about using `ping host`? This also prints the ip
Ah, sorry, I wasn't clear in my statement:
A function that it provides is to display the public IP address from a host behind the NAT.
Another way to do this: `dig @resolver1.opendns.com ANY myip.opendns.com +short`[0] ... it's just trickier to remember. And since dig is a tool for performing DNS lookups, `man dig` doesn't hint at this particular trick.
In fact, I didn't actually remember the command that displays that for `climate`[1], because if I had, I would have written it as `public-ip`, which `climate help` informed me of. :)
[0] ... or if you prefer a more interactive and profane experience, try `lynx wtfismyip.com`
[1] My public IP is displayed on terminal start since I need it with some frequency; Of course, it's displayed as "External IP:", which is something I'll have to remedy.
or "dig host" for a proper dns lookup
https://newsboat.org/ Newsboat, fantastic RSS reader, built on top of newsbeuter.
http://www.mutt.org/ Mutt for email of course.
https://vifm.info/ Vifm file manager, I am using it for everything, not having any other file manager on my system.
https://github.com/pimutils/khal Khal for calendar.
https://github.com/scheibler/khard/ Khard for contacts.
https://github.com/pimutils/vdirsyncer Vdirsyncer to sync calendar and contacts with any web calendar service.
Mutt is great, but if you want to use a "real" programming language to configure your client you might enjoy my alternative:
it's nice to see new approaches to email in a terminal. how about integration with notmuch?
greetings, eMBee.
I think the people that enjoy notmuch would probably prefer to stick with what they know.
If I were to use their query-based API, and just be a UI on it, then that'd be an almost complete rewrite.
on the contrary for the first point. i suspect that most enjoy notmuch with their traditional interface because there are not many alternatives. probably most people looking for interface alternatives switched to gmail.
commandline UI development in particular seems very conservative, and attempts to explore new interfaces are rare. that's why i love this topic and am getting excited about any attempt to change that.
i obviously can't comment on what it takes to integrate notmuch with lumail, and i grant that one may possibly have to develop a mailclient with notmuch in mind for it to work well.
greetings, eMBee.
I love `jq`: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
httpie is the nonstandard command I use the most I think (https://httpie.org/). Syntax highlighting for everything that comes down the pipe is pretty awesome. I'm also a sucker for bat (https://github.com/sharkdp/bat) which I just found out about through this thread.
My zshrc includes a bunch of commands you might like, btw: https://github.com/jleclanche/dotfiles
Among them, the ones I use the most are `json` and `yaml` for pretty printing both formats, as well as `urlencode` / `urldecode` / `urlarray` which I recently added.
If you need to handle XML, xmlstarlet (http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net) is fantastic, and much more powerful than the standard line-oriented tools like sed and awk for this task.
Similarly jq (https://stedolan.github.io/jq/) for JSON data is great.
And to round out the set, xsv (https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv/) is a powerful toolkit for CSV.
The only issue I have with xmlstarlet is that it can be sort of a pain when there are xml namespaces in the document. Most of the time, you just have to pass it the long option that ignores them all together
* Email - neomutt + notmuch.
* Chat - Weechat + WeeSlack (https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack)
* Pair Programming - tmate.io + neovim
* Google Play Music - tuijam(https://github.com/cfangmeier/tuijam)
I really like bat (https://github.com/sharkdp/bat) as a cat replacement, and I've been enjoying using entr (http://entrproject.org/) for running tests automatically when code changes.
websocketd - Turn any command that uses stdin into a web socket server (i.e. connect to it from any browser) https://github.com/joewalnes/websocketd
sqlite shell - https://www.sqlite.org/download.html
combine the two for a high throughput web app - https://hackernoon.com/stream-a-million-websocket-sql-reques...
I had blogged about websocket with an example using Python and JavaScript here:
Use WebSockets and Python for web-based system monitoring:
https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2014/01/use-websockets-and-pytho...
websocketd and Python for system monitoring - the JavaScript WebSocket client:
https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2014/01/websocketd-and-python-fo...
Will check out your hackernoon post, sounds interesting.
I read that post. It's impressive that the combination of websocketd and sqlite can be so fast.
Not exactly useful, but it makes me smile every time I use it: https://github.com/will8211/unimatrix
The Fuck — https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck
Magnificent app which corrects your previous console command
If you use zsh something like that is already included.
Typing fuck is satisfying though
Always had a soft spot for 'hollywood'
rsync. It’s installed everywhere and makes it super easy to keep source code in sync between laptop and remote servers. It’s so fast that I completely ignore more advanced solutions based on fanotify or similar, and literally include rsync before every “build/run” command during development.
I wrote a Python cli tool for getting the git status/history over multiple local repositories. I am often working across several repos on a single project, but generally I find it useful to see what updates are available, and also what my team are up to.
https://github.com/benp44/git-bulk-toolkit
shameless plug alert
I use mr [1] for this
I love watch.
watch df -h
watch ls -sh
watch cat file
watch nmcli device wifi list
watch -n 10 --color curl -s wttr.inYes, watch is a cool command. I had written a Python program somewhat like watch:
A Python version of the Linux watch command:
https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-python-version-of-linu...
I think I remember combining watch with tail before...not sure why since -f keeps a stream open.
Tail -f works by opening the file and remembering the byte offset, if it’s a log file that gets flushed/wiped then tail -f won’t see anything until the logs fill enough to exceed the previous file contents.
Unless you pass the option --follow=name in which case tail will if necessary reopen the file and follow it even when log-application has closed and moved it elsewhere and opened a new one of the same name.
True, but the `-F` flag will work in that case.
TIL
Works on BSD `tail` too. :)
My favorite use is:
I find it very soothing. :)watch ps fxWishing we could do this without polling, though ...
always need to install watch and tree
If you aren't using tmux or screen, you probably should be, especially over SSH sessions. They allow you to have multiple consoles open and switch between them, split window, and disconnect from SSH and then reconnect with all your things still open and running (as long as the server stayed running).
I have a EC2 instance who's main purpose is to run a screen session. I ssh to my EC2, and load that screen. I have every server I manage in it's own "window" inside this screen. I run screen on each of these machines, so I can hop between inner and outer screens.
The main screen instance is started with:
screen -S outer_screen
I then create a screen session for that EC2 with
screen -S inner_screen
I pop open new screens with this handy command:
screen -S outer_screen -X screen -t newmachine ssh user@newserver.example.com
As someone who hasn't invested much time into tmux/screen, what are the benefits of it over just using eg; multiple terminal tabsn or using the terminal's built in split windowing? I'm sure there's probably a benefit but I dunno what it is
If it's all on one device and no networking, I don't know of any great benefit. But if you sometimes connect to the machine remotely then Tmux allows you to pick up an existing session, e.g.
You open tmux on your desktop, open some command line things, then walk away and pull out your laptop or desktop, SSH to your computer, "tmux attach" and have the same session open - and it's open on both devices, both seeing the same updates at the same time, like a terminal-vnc.
And you can variously use them to allow two separate users to share the same session, either one controlling and others read-only, or multiple-editing ( https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/2523/what-are-other... )
I agree with everyone else that it's great on remote systems, but the reason I use it locally too is because I can set up all a project's "tabs" with just one command. I have dozen-line scripts for each client/project that will either create or attach to a tmux session, and when creating set up all the windows how I want: setting their names, cd'ing, opening psql, tailing a log, changing the bottom color (green for development, yellow for staging, red for production), etc. For Rails work I typically have separate windows for models, controllers, views, stylesheets, and javascripts. It makes it really easy to get started after a reboot, or just hide projects for a while and bring them back quickly.
occasionally i need to restart the GUI. using tmux locally is very helpful for that. also sometimes i log into my workstation from remote, like when i am travelling. it's nice to be able to access the running session.
Both tmux and screen allow you to attach/detach. Thus you can log off, and you can pick up your session later.
For example, yesterday I logged into a Linux server at DigitalOcean via SSH. I ran tmux, started a long-running job, detached the session. I closed my laptop to go home for lunch. When I returned at my desk, I logged into the server and reattached the tmux session so I could see the results.
One useful reason to use it over a terminal is portability. If you're happy mostly working in the terminal then tmux will be the same on every OS your work on even if your favourite terminal isn't available.
It persists your session, so if you get disconnected you can just log in again and 'tmux attach' to resume from where you left off. Any long running commands will still be running.
I use some scripts around screen (and tmux would do the job at least as well, just haven't had reason enough to switch) to manage contexts for my shells. The key is that that process will be the parent of any shells I spawn in contained windows, and so if I set an environment variable (I use SESSION) before kicking off screen it will be inherited, and visible in my bashrc. This lets me set up a lot of context specific things - path and functions and aliases - but the single best thing about it is a separate bash history per context.
A bunch of references from Suckless community that you can enjoy:
I really appreciate the people who include descriptions and links for their list. My list has been pruned to avoid duplication (though perhaps knowing what's popular is a good metric too).
asdf: https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf - installs many different programming languages and supports installing different versions concurrently. I use it for go installs since distribution updates aren't usually fast enough.
solaar: https://github.com/pwr/Solaar - handles configuring a logitech unifying receiver in Linux. Not really something you'd use multiple times, but am thankful it exists (also has a GUI too I believe).
Open-source tool for quickly opening and exploring tabular data: https://jsvine.github.io/intro-to-visidata/index.html
(Disclaimer: I build homebrew, apt, etc packages for VisiData.)
tabview [1] is a somewhat simpler tool for navigating tabular data that I install everywhere
Goaccess is a great little realtime log file analyzer in a similar vein as webalizer. Not only does it work through the console it can also output html.
(this is just something I found recently, not affiliated with it or anything)
Three tools I make sure are installed on everything I use via CLI: rsync, pv, & progress.
rsync (usually over SSH): the kitchen sync of file transfer commands. In Linux-land it is quite common to find it already installed, and if not it is in the standard repos. Available for Windows too.
pv (pipeviewer, http://www.ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml): very useful for monitoring some classes of long-running process.
progress (https://github.com/Xfennec/progress): for similar reasons to pv, wanting to see how a long-running task (that isn't giving its own progress information) is getting on.
z - track most-used directories and jump to them
https://github.com/jethrokuan/z (fish port)
Used to use that but stopped after while, figured it's easier to just type a name or alias/symlink it if it's used often -- then it's deterministic in a non-interactive way, i.e. I can type it with my eyes closed and I know the end result.
With tools like z I'll have to type less letters in the end but it requires interaction, and interaction/attention is more expensive than keypresses, at least in my world :)
Useful tool replacements that some people have already mentioned:
- ls -> exa
- cat -> bat
- find -> fd
- top -> htop -> glances
- grep -> ack -> ag -> rg
- hr (to draw a horizontal line in your terminal)
A lightning talk about them: https://youtu.be/hp-1plTKOqc?t=551
A url link to each toll would be nice
Checkout command line based spreadsheet editor. sc-im(https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im) if you are heavy vim user, you would definitely love it
If you do any bash/sh programming, I highly recommend shellcheck: https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck
Agreed, highly recommended. I dreaded writing shell scripts for the longest time because of the weird syntax and many gotchas. Having emacs flycheck my shell buffers with shellcheck gives me confidence that I'm not doing anything stupid.
I so wish this worked with zsh -- great tool, none-the-less.
If I had to pick a single utility, it would be pv[0]. It's very simple, but I find myself using it all the time. Basically you stick it in a pipeline of commands to get a progress bar. The simplest usage is just to replace cat or input redirection with a call to pv. Saves a lot of time when I can quickly find out if the command I wrote is going to take 30 seconds or 30 minutes.
up - https://github.com/akavel/up
Ultimate Plumber is a tool for writing Linux pipes with instant live preview
It's a new CLI tool I've recently written, and it reached a Top 1 position on HN just after the public release. It works with other classic CLI tools by boosting the speed with which they can be composed together. It's especially useful for quick exploration of logs, CSV files, and other text files or pipelines.
is it like less?
Um; I feel it's kinda as if you asked if a dog is like rhinoceros... How do I even answer that? Simplest answer is: "no, it's not"; though if you squint your eyes super hard, you could see some kind of vague resemblance, maybe?
Have you seen the readme? There's an animated gif showing how it works, and a more detailed description.
Yeah, have you seen the readme?
> interactively and incrementally explore textual data
Just like less.
> This is achieved by boosting any typical Linux text-processing utils such as grep, sort, cut, paste, awk, wc, perl, etc., etc., by providing a quick, interactive, scrollable preview of their results.
Yep, that's less.
> use PgUp/PgDn and Ctrl-[←]/Ctrl-[→] for basic browsing through the command output;
Sure that's not like less? You can even start searching results of a high output command immediately after the pipe.
Apparently dogs aren't that different?
Ahahah, lol, ok, get it :D So, apparently I totally reinvented less, I concede :)
To say even more, it's actually very much a crippled less (not all of its functions available!). With just one feature added, namely:
> in the input box at the top of the screen, start writing any bash pipeline; then press Enter to execute the command you typed, and the Ultimate Plumber will immediately show you the output of the pipeline in the scrollable window.
At least for me personally, it was painfully worth reimplementing the crippled less functionalities for this single little addition. Though I do admit I felt the lack of the slash-to-search feature of less already yesterday when using up...
And, to explain myself a bit, I really tried my best at explaining the tool in the readme... it's just that I can't currently think of any better wording :( If by any chance you had some idea/suggestion how you think I could improve it, I'd be super eager to hear it! I'm kinda too deep in the trenches to be able to look at it from a distance, so even seemingly obvious (to you) comments (as the one with the comparison to less, after you explained it) are sincerely valuable to me!
I haven't used the command, but from what I understand, it is like a shell with less-like interface that you can pipe to, and work on a copy of the output stream.
I guess one way to articulate what you are doing is building /up/ more commands in a step by step fashion with immediate feedback. It is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if processing or preparation times for the input are long. However, you could also accomplish the same thing with a smaller sample size and repeatedly applying your commands using a regular shell instead of an interactive less.
I'm a cli junkie but I've gone from using very minimal tiling WMs to vanilla Gnome. So I've stopped using bitlbee for example, but bitlbee is something I'd use a lot in the days of 100% terminal.
It's an IRC proxy for other protocols like Skype or Slack.
I have no idea how it stands up today but I always liked the concept of having one service that handled conversion of all the modern protocols to text based.
Other than that I think people have already given amazing recommendations so I have nothing to add.
Curious what made you leave tiling WMs? I think about switching back occasionally, but still use dwm.
I also used to use bitlbee, but once AIM died I dropped it.
Slack dropped their irc gateway a while ago. I recommend wee-slack[1] which is a weechat[2] python plugin that uses the Slack API instead of the old IRC gateway, which also means it is a lot more feature rich than the IRC gateway was.
1 - https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack 2 - https://weechat.org/
My focus has always been on being able to work without issue. Without OS locking up or without tools malfunctioning.
Used to have laptops with 256MB RAM for example, or 1024x768 pixel resolution. So I'd do anything to cram as much as possible into a tiny screen using as little resources as possible.
Now my laptop has 8G of RAM and an i7 CPU at 2.5GHz and 4 virtual cores. On top of that Linux and Gnome have made a lot of advances so it runs like a dream and I can work without having ~100 lines of configuration in my WM.
More seamlessly go from my own to someone elses computer without forgetting that caps lock is my Meta key. It all pretty much resembles Windows and Mac OS more.
I just don't see any purpose with torturing myself using a minimal resource desktop environment when I don't have to.
The main program is still gnome-terminal and tmux, I still do a majority of my work there. Habitually use cli for as much as possible, even simple operations that I could do in the Gnome file browser.
But I do it all with a vanilla Gnome configuration and I still don't miss a thing.
It's probably not what you'd use often/at all but I recently was glad to discover Google's import-mailbox-to-gmail[0] script.
Technically a CLI I suppose, it imports an mbox file into Gmail. I had switched to G Suite and wanted to import some old emails. It took a while but this did the trick!
tig
(That's git backwards)
It's a luxury and you don't need it if you use something like fugitive in vim, but its a lovely little tool.
Think SourceTree but on the command line.
tig doesn't feel like SourceTree. It's not easy to just see list of changed files from a commit to the next.
In that sense, lazygit is more navigation friendly.
daily-ish drivers of mine:
- autossh - https://linux.die.net/man/1/autossh
- sshfs - https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs
- pandoc - https://pandoc.org/installing.html
- exiftool - https://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/
- htop - https://hisham.hm/htop/
- tmux - https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki
- rsync - https://rsync.samba.org/
- midnight commander - https://midnight-commander.org/ (faster, than loop ing ls, cd .., ls)
Still trying to think about the others.
nc - arbitrary TCP and UDP connections and listens
File transfer between machines:
$ nc -l 1234 > filename.out
$ nc host.example.com 1234 < filename.in
$ while true ; do nc -l -p 1500 -c 'echo -e "HTTP/1.1 200 OK\n\n $(date)"'; doneTry ncat from nmap - it has more features. And for some specific applications - socat.
Ledger is a simple tool to keep track of your expenses.
Oh, I wrote an article on this a while ago! It's mostly about smaller utilities, not full-fledged apps. Also, I ws focusing on the ones that are lesser known. Still could be useful for some: https://code.kiwi.com/lesser-known-tools-we-love-at-kiwi-com...
here is a nice selection by bryan lunduke:
https://www.networkworld.com/article/3091139/linux/who-needs...
he lists:
email: alpine
webbrowser: w3m
editor: nano
wordprocessing: wordgrinder http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder/index.html
audioplayer: cmus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cmus
instant messaging: finch and hangups https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using%20Finch https://github.com/tdryer/hangups
twitter: rainbowstream https://github.com/orakaro/rainbowstream
reddit: rtv https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv
ps: htop
filemanager: midnight commander
terminal manager: tmux
presentations: tpp http://www.ngolde.de/tpp.html
greetings, eMBee.
abcde - A Better CD Encoder (http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/page/) I bought three cheap USB CD drives and concurrently ripped all of my CDs to FLAC over the course of a couple of weekends. abcde gets the best possible copy.
ddrescue - GNU ddrescue (https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/) not to be confused with dd_rescue (http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/) This piece of software is outstandingly good for rescuing bits from failing spinning rust. It doesn't care about the filesystem, it just tries really hard to get data from a raw device. Once you've got all the bits onto a safer medium, you can use testdisk to explore the disk image.
archiver: https://github.com/mholt/archiver create and extract .zip, .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.xz, .tar.lz4, .tar.sz, extract.rar
I’m surprised that nobody is mentioning plain old Bash. The builtins are pretty powerful, and in many ways Bash is the “standard” cli.
Git Standup - https://github.com/kamranahmedse/git-standup
Coinmon (Requires node) - https://github.com/bichenkk/coinmon
httpie + jq is a great duo for exploring and manually probing APIs.
Gron (grep JSON) is handy when you get a massive API response and quickly need to figure out what subkeys interest you.
The silver searcher (ag) is my go-to code search tool. I'll have to try ripgrep to compare.
Pass is neat for injecting personal secrets into bash scripts securely.
Here's a feature comparison chart of the various grepalike tools:
I am always impressed by the usefulness of the git command line. If you wanted to write a GUI for it you usually would have a library to link to but the GUIs (e.g SourceTree) I have seen use the command line and still get good performance.
Another one is ffmpeg. A ton of tools are built on it.
For photographers exiftool is great.
byobu (http://byobu.co/) is an amazing thing to have on your remote server, sessions and switchable windows + splits make this a must-have tool. Think of it as tabs but for your SSH session, plus many more features.
People might be more familiar if you would describe it as a t-mux alternative.
Just a quick note on this - byobu isn't a tmux alternative exactly. It actually uses tmux (or screen) on the back-end. So it's more like a nicely configured tmux.conf/.screenrc with standardized bindings.
Some of my favorites, apart from the obvious ones like Vim/Emacs and common Unix utils...
notmuch - email database
ncmpcpp - MPD frontend (music player)
taskwarrior - task and time management
mutt - email
ranger - file manager
pass - password managerBesides what others have added, I also love:
proselint: http://proselint.com/
alex: https://github.com/get-alex/alex
Both are CLI linters for prose.
Steam locomotive sl is ESSENTIAL to any command line work. If you don't use it you are a fool.
Lots of great stuff here! Key takeaway though (for me at least) is that a lot of this stuff turns into cumbersome management if you're not doing the bulk of your work on localhost, but instead dealing with a various few dozen or hundreds (in my case) of different servers. Yeah you can use ansible to automate installation/setup, but then again if you suddenly end up on a fresh server without root access you're gonna be/feel crippled, being used to aliasing everything and replacing standard shells with something extra fancy.
Some level of balance is needed, which is what I've been trying to do. That said I always setup oh-my-zsh and `git config --global alias.kurwa status` wherever I go.
localhost or remote does not make a difference, any manual setup required is annoying either way.
most of the tools don't need manual configuration though and so it's a single command to install all of them that you can have tucked away somewhere to use when needed.
but yeah, i use salt for automating this.
z - jump around https://github.com/rupa/z
Guake - dropdown terminal with tabs for linux :) I can't see my day without it !
that's not a CLI tool but a tool for running CLI commands :-)
Hahah true ! But damn its useful!
Maybe the best part of bash for me is AWK - so useful, and enjoyable to use. I use ffmpeg a lot for making movies from images, video conversion etc. I use Sage on the command line, mostly for programming in Cython and mathematical stuff with the Sage/Python REPL. It was 2.7GB (!) and comes with an absurd number of libraries and packages[0], mostly for maths and graphics. I started by using it in a browser notebook, but switched to the command line and never went back.
I agree. A lot of them come with a UNIX system, although there are others. I use some of the moreutils stuff. For email, I use Heirloom-mailx. For text editing, I use vim. For database I use SQLite. For typesetting I use TeX. For processing pictures I implemented my own package called Farbfeld Utilities. For making MOD/XM musics, I wrote AmigaMML which uses a text file rather than the GUI that many other programs do. Hopefully other people on here can mention even more, because I am interested in the answer too, and probably my answer is insufficient to the original asker anyways.
1) Moon Buggy -- ASCII art version of moon-buggy game.[0]
2) SHPaint -- ANSI Art editor programmed in bash.[1,2]
[0] http://www.seehuhn.de/pages/moon-buggy.html
a tool that looks very promising is xiki: http://xiki.org/ i haven't been able to try it myself yet, but i am curious to hear if anyone else has played with it.
sadly the creator hasn't been able to work on it since the last funding campaign failed, but he is preparing a new campaign just now: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/xiki/Dvzo14Lhoyg
greetings, eMBee.
> I really enjoy using a command-line interface instead of a graphical user interface
I'm not sure what kind of interface you mean here, but judging by the responses graphical interface in terminal is OK. In that case,
*lazygit https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit
first GUI on top of git that I didn't hate. Primarily because it doesn't break the flow in command line. Instead of diff/add/commit I open this, but for the rest I still use git directly (or through aliases).
BorgBackup: https://github.com/borgbackup/borg
Deduplication, compression, encryption, to local or remote targets.
restic and duplicacy are modern alternatives.
They are, but Borg is also modern.
I love 'bpython' , python CLI with syntax highlighting and autocomplete for testing out quick ideas.
Slightly off topic, but can I just say that iTerm2's native tmux integration is really awesome.
Ah yes! I knew I had forgotten to install something recently
I wonder if there's any 2FA code storing/generating cli application? I know they aren't supposed to be used like that but storing them all on just a phone doesn't seem wise in the long run. Might be useful while building some automated scripts as well.
_edit_
oathtool seems promising (needs to be paired with something to manage and crypt the keys tho) http://www.nongnu.org/oath-toolkit/oathtool.1.html
I use totp-cli:
If you use pass as a password manager, you can use pass-otp to keep the 2fa keys.
I am getting fonder and fonder of xargs. It basically reads some input and appends it to a pre-supplied string. Then executes the newly created string as a command.
Trivial example:
ls -1 | xargs -L1 echo processing
ssh netappuser@netapphost volume snapshot show $volname | awk '/selector_pattern/{print $1}' | xargs -L1 ssh netappuser@netapphost volume snapshot delete $volnameWith xargs (and find), I wish I would've found this sooner:
find test -print0 | xargs -0 file
"This allows file names that contain newlines or other types of white space to be correctly interpreted by programs that process the find output. This option corresponds to the -0 option of xargs."
Perl also supports -0 and is handy for some use cases because it won't spawn a process per line like xargs.
# remove files without spawning lots of rm processes find . -name "*.xyz" -print0 -type f| perl -0 -ne 'chomp;print "$_\n";unlink;'
As a windows admin, docker has actually been super handy for running CLI tools with platforms (linux) that I can't easily get or have no will to compile natively myself on windows.
fzf is awesome. I use it in vim and bash.
https://www.tecmint.com/fzf-fuzzy-file-search-from-linux-ter...
----
I use the Silver Searcher all the time. Very fast.
https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher
----
tig, a text mode interface for git.
It's been mentioned previous, but you should check out ripgrep - it's even faster than Silver Searcher a lot of the time
Does anyone not working on million-line codebase ever find themselves limited by grep? I am genuinely curious.
Unfortunately, I work on a million-line codebase.
Grep might be fine 99% of the time, but there's no reason to not drop a ripgrep binary on every machine I use regularly.
Ripgrep is faster across the board and has better defaults for working in Git repositories. Since I'm working with a large codebase managed in Git, it's a no-brainer.
Performance isn't necessarily the only reason that folks use ripgrep. A lot of people like its smart filtering by default. Some don't though. See: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/FAQ.md#pos...
Do you mean more or less than 1M LOC?
grep is usable on very large code bases, because after the first scan, all the sources are loaded in the file system cache, so the successive grep are done in RAM and are very fast.
So much so that I almost never use ctags despite the improved semantic search (you can find more easily the exact identifiers and distinguish them by category). grep is just as fast and precise enough.
Haven't seen Hledger [http://hledger.org/] in the recommendations. It is a great accounting tool!
Sort of on topic...Does anyone know of a good interactive resource for learning some of the tools that are included by default on UNIX systems? RTFM is useful, of course.
Not sure what you mean interactive - trying things out on bash itself is a good way to learn. I put together a (quite long) single-webpage not-so-quick guide to bash shell,[0] which covers a lot of the basic stuff (well, with separate pages for grep/sed and AWK), at the bottom of the page are links to the best bash websites and names of the best books that I've found. Hope that's of some use. But yeah, the man pages become perfectly adequate guides/refreshers once you've learnt the basics of a command/tool - especially using them with "/" for searching for what you want.
I don't know about interactive, but the book Unix Power Tools is a great survey, with quite a lot of depth.
If you want something interactive as you work through the book (and even CLI itself), it would be hard to beat bash. ;-)
is this what you are looking for?
https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-the-command-line
greetings, eMBee.
I can't believe nobody has mentioned VisiData. It's like Vim, but for structured data.
Various grepalike tools like ack, ag and rg have been mentioned. Most comments seem to be based on which tool runs simple searches faster, but note that their feature sets vary widely.
Here's a handy chart that compares the features of each of these tools, along with git grep and plain ol' GNU grep.
I guess these are so obvious no one mentioned them, but: ssh, git, zsh, bash, curl, wget, gpg, gzip, xz, btrfs, qemu, pv, tar, diff, comm, column, sort, uniq, sed, bc, tr, od, xxd, tcpdump, tshark, ping, nmap, ip, iw, xdotool, xrdb, grep, pgrep, pkill, lsof, inotifywait, journalctl, systemctl, convert, ed, and probably countless more I'm taking too much for granted to remember.
My top 4:
40.2% ls
22.8% cd
15.6% python
3.6% nano
Nano simply and efficiently gets the job done in 70% of cases.
Nano Vim Xdg youtube-dl wttr git curl top watch
nano is not on many of the systems i deal with - vi is.
* fish - essential prerequisite in order to live in the command line
* autojump (aka j) - for changing directories quickly
* open - required to interact with the non-cli world, ships by default on macOS and here's one for Windows/WSL: https://github.com/neosmart/open
* imgpaste - for pasting screenshots into a PNG or JPEG directly (https://github.com/neosmart/imgpaste)
* pbpaste - for pasting into the shell (or if you're on Linux or Windows: https://github.com/mqudsi/fish-config/blob/master/functions/...)
* fzf - a general-purpose "selector" ui for choosing "things" from a list based off, such as your history (bound to ctrl+r) or files in a directory (bound to ctrl+p with input generated by bfs or fd)
* neovim - my configuration here: https://github.com/mqudsi/nvim-config
* ripgrep - for finding strings in files
* fd - for finding files quickly
* sed (with -r) - insanely powerful for common string operations
* tr - lets you deal with line endings, which sed can't
* youtube-dl - download youtube videos from the CLI
* curl/httpie - (scriptable) network requests
* aria2c - high-speed (multi-threaded) downloads and torrent downloads, it just works
* jq - for manipulating json in shell scripts
* ncdu - find space taken up by directories/files, but it's aging and in need of a dire rewrite like fd/rg did for find/grep
* pbedit - edit the contents of the clipboard in your favorite editor https://github.com/mqudsi/fish-config/blob/master/functions/...
* weechat - irc in your command line
* ffmpeg - except I am much more likely to use it via one of the wrapper fish scripts I've written such as ffencode, fftrim, ffconcat, ffmute, etc. because it is (necessarily) so damn verbose and infinitely tunable.
* tmux - if I'm working remotely or on a headless machine where I can't just ctrl+shift+n to open a new terminal window (which I prefer)
> tr - lets you deal with line endings, which sed can't
I'm not sure what you mean by "deal with line endings", but sed can operate across multiple lines.
https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/html_node/Text-searc...
Maybe is meant you can remove the carriage returns easily, in case you want only the line feed on the end of the line.
I mean directly operating on the line ending itself. e.g. remove all lines or replace `\n` with the record separator, etc.
Like so?
% echo 'one\ntwo\nthree' | sed -e 's,$, four,' one four two four three fourNo, like this:
> echo ‘one\ntwo\nthree’ | tr \n \| one|two|threeecho -e 'one\ntwo\nthree' | sed -ze 's/\n/|/g'
Hey, thanks for teaching me that!
* howdoi: stackoverflow from the shell: https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi, don't leave you terminal while programming
Forget tr/sed, just use `perl -i.original -pe`
On bare-bones unixish systems, you’ll be more likely to find sed/tr than Perl (for me, a clean FreeBSD install).
I use mcabber and irssi for chat. Mcabber doesn't really support much in the way of features (so even on a modern XMPP server you're missing simple things like fetching history), but its vi style shortcuts and nice layout mean I can't give it up. Combined with jmp.chat I can even send text messages from it.
Some I like...
jq - process json on the command line: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
perl one liner to debug a regex: perl -e 'use re "debug"; "xyz" =~ /x*y+z/;'
"hd -c" - I like this hexdump format
lsof - debug open files/sockets/etc
Vue-cli is pretty awesome! https://cli.vuejs.org
I really really don't like what they did with version 3. What the heck is happening in my app? And what coder whants a gui for his dependencies???
I can't believe no one mentioned parallel[1] yet, it is basically a much more powerful replacement to xargs and available at most package managers.
Here's my list of 369 useful programs:
https://paste.pound-python.org/raw/Uqc8XTFk73Y3PpbRe9hC/
It's not 100% made up of command-line programs, but most of them are.
fzf - command-line fuzzy finder https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
Easy to overlook... I almost don't even notice it, but I use it more than any other application (every time I type).
peerflix - https://www.npmjs.com/package/peerflix
A streaming torrent client. I guess there are similar ones.
Watching a torrent becomes:
peerflix <magnet> --mplayer -t subtitleneofetch [https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch] for showing a friendly system information
gst123 [http://space.twc.de/~stefan/gst123.php] a music player
prettyping [https://github.com/denilsonsa/prettyping] a prettier ping
kakoune [https://github.com/mawww/kakoune] a nice (relatively friendly) modal text editor
I use `ack` (https://beyondgrep.com/) as a replacement for `grep`. It is simpler, faster, it has colors by default and it's really fast and very useful for programming.
Very useful - I use ack-grep for MacOS
supmua. https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup beats mutt hands down. groups emails by tags instead of folders.
and it allows to open multiple views at once, keeping state in each. it also supports saved searches as a view.
it's not actively maintained right now, but it is stable. i haven't had any problems yet.
sup is the ancestor of the notmuch libraries which can be integrated into mutt. but i don't know how well that works. perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18483833 can shed some light on that.
greetings, eMBee.
quoting https://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-mutt/
> notmuch-mutt, which will create a "virtual" maildir folder with search results whenever a search is made. The upside is that you can search all your folders simultaneously; the downside is that your modifications in the results listing do not carry over, also having to switch folders comes with some more annoyances.
sup does not have that problem. i have used mutt for more than a decade. switching to sup was a revelation. i would really love to see any alternatives that can compete with it.
greetings, eMBee.
I almost constantly listen to music. When I do so, I only use cmus nowadays.
Awesome lightweight music player
imagemagick - Clint too for changing images. When you need to turn an entire folder of pictures into a single PDF, encode them so that the file size isn't huge and scale them to avoid morie patterns, it's the tool of choice.
Everything else I like has been mentioned, save for GNU datamash (https://www.gnu.org/software/datamash/)
I would gladly see a list of useful aliases for omnipresent CLI utilities like `grep`, `ls`, `cat`, `less`, `cut`, etc. They're surprisingly powerful but going through their man pages is like reading a whole library.
tldr is really handy for that: https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr
Check out: https://github.com/herrbischoff/awesome-command-line-apps
You’ll be sure to find something useful.
For sysadmin needs:
- htop (better top)
- nload (network traffic visualization)
- nano (I know, but works great for simple editing)
- curl (http everything tool)
- telnet/nc (check listening ports)I hate that nano is so looked down on. I use it too and it's a great tool. I don't feel any shame using it.
nethogs - Can show bandwidth per process.
lnav - mini-ETL w/ embedded sqlite; parse and query logfiles or any other structured text-based input... it's powerful, intuitive, extensible.
Here's a simple game - 2048 in your terminal :) : https://github.com/plibither8/2048.cpp
(shameless plug) git number: https://github.com/holygeek/git-number
Use numbers for dealing with files in git.
multitail, a powerful tail replacement with highlighting, split panes and comfortable buffer search. mostly used in long running tmux sessions.
for example, u could pipe in tcpdump output to analyze dump in realtime
My setup on servers and programming environments:
* fish shell
* tmux (multiplexer)
* emacs-nox (non-GUI version)
* mocp (music player)
* w3m (web browser)
* htop (process viewer)Saw: https://github.com/TylerBrock/saw -- Stream (tail -f) colorized AWS CloudWatch logs
for a software keyboard, since I've seen several lists of aliases:
```alias ,v='mv' alias r,='mv'```
Otherwise:
ttyclock tmux/byobu pv ncdu htop megadl webcomix and/or dosage - download webcomics into cbz files for local viewing. Installable via pip. elinks, links2 - Browsers. especially useful if compiled with javascript support. nnn aria2c grc most mlocate (prrovides thelocate and updatedb connands. I can't recall why i like it more than slocate or find-utils)
Generally built-in:
watch tee sed (or just use `perl -pi -e` 7z
'Fun' cli programs:
nyancat sl cowsay toilet ttysolitaire
subliminal: https://github.com/Diaoul/subliminal
great tool for downloading subtitles, sadly it seems unmaintained and sometimes fails to work
rtorrent: https://github.com/rakshasa/rtorrent
my preferred way to download ISOs of Linux distributions
And a +1 for some that were already mentioned: tig, ripgrep, htop, midnight commander
https://github.com/mfaerevaag/wd - Jump to custom directories in zsh
WebTorrent https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent-cli
I love ImageMagick. We were able to write a script to join thousands of images from command line. The manual GUI way of joining images would have been incredibly slow.
How about Ly, the terminal display manager: https://github.com/cylgom/ly
F yeah, dude.
One that I use a lot and I haven't seen mentioned here is `dict` which is fine for looking up word definitions and acronyms if a bit limited for translations.
AWS CLI replacement: awless https://github.com/wallix/awless
- pdfgrep : grep search pdfs
- htop : A nicer version of the process viewer top
- rename : bulk rename things via a regex/sed-like interface
- youtube-dl -x : download the audio of a video
- locate : Find something anywhere.
> locate : Find something anywhere.
I strongly dislike updatedb, which is always stealing CPU cycles at inconvenient moments, and locate often seems out of date.
We should have had instant, database-like indexing in our filesystems ages ago.
You can run updatedb more frequently. By default it is run on a daily cron job and has the smarts to not run when on battery. (see /etc/cron.daily/mlocate)
You can also exclude directories in /etc/updatedb.conf that you don't want locate to index. I think in your case a more frequent cron job make sense. If run often enough, it finishes very quickly when running updatedb, which will you give you the instant search you're looking for.
Second the usefulness of rename, but beware there is some confusion about the name of the tool. It's called 'rename' on debian and derivatives and 'prename' on RH and derivatives.
gitsh - https://github.com/thoughtbot/gitsh
Since git is by far the command a lot of people type the most, this shell comes in really handy. It supports all regular git aliases, has autocompletion, super useful for setting temporary names when pair programming, and you can set default commands to be run when you just press return.
sox - the Swiss Army knife of sound processing programs
tmux: https://man.openbsd.org/tmux
vi: https://man.openbsd.org/vi
entr: http://entrproject.org/
shellcheck: http://shellcheck.net
I really like the find(1) command on Unixoid systems. On Windows, I have installed git some machines simply to have grep and find available.
Hugo static website generator - https://gohugo.io/
a very useful set of utilities, that i only recently discovered here on hackernews are imv and qmv from http://www.nongnu.org/renameutils/
it makes renaming of long filenames much easier. especially if there are many files with similar names.
greetings, eMBee.
Taskwarrior: https://taskwarrior.org/
Insect for converting between units
diff2html: https://diff2html.xyz/ -- view your diff color-coded in HTML
just run `npm install -g diff2html-cli` and `diff2html`
I recommend this alias `alias diff='diff2html -s side'`
One line bash command to convert (almost) any type of file to any another format using the Zamzar API.
Convert PDF to Word, Powerpoint to JPG, WMV to MP4, DWG to PDF etc:
https://github.com/zamzar/zamzar-bash
(Full disclosure: I'm one of the co-founders at Zamzar).
AWK: lighweight, fast, versatile, incredibly powerful programming language.
one of my favorites is Sym. " Symmetric Encryption that's easy on Humans"
Ncdu
pwgen - Handy to create a password. It generates dozens at once which you can pick from.
cal - Obvious but I still launch GUI calendar app when I can just type 3 letters to check on dates.
* tldr - better than man in 80% of cases
* htop - better version of top for multi-core machines
* tmux - when you want to run long-running commands
Emacs. Because it is.
`sl` -- makes you feel better about mis-typing `ls`!
fasd - fast navigation in command line
asdf - universal installation tool for ruby, node, go, etc
ripgrep - very fast search
zsh - shell (with zsh-autosuggestions and fasd hooks)
I'll second fasd , for me though bash with bash-it is easier than setting up zsh.
I found zsh to be quite easy to setup with oh-my-zsh. The installation is a few commands and the defaults are sane, I use it with minimum modifications. YMMV
I'm not big on applications, period. Activities should be decomposed (or at least decomposable) into individual actions that I can stitch together in the shell.
I agree, we can use the pipes to put them together. That is how I do such thing, and design these programs, at least.
For example, one program is "playmod" which read a module music file from stdin, and write the raw audio data to stdout. The program "amigamml" is takes the MML code from stdin and write the module music file to stdout. And then, program "aplay" is playing the audio data from stdin on the speaker. Other example can be, "ls" to list files, "shuf" to put into a random order, and "xargs" to run another program for each one, and a shell script might then do "playmod" and "aplay", you can play the music at random!
Aren’t those individual actions still applications? I don’t know what you mean?
There's a frequent (but by no means universal) distinction drawn between "applications" and "utilities". In the former case, you have repeated interaction with a single process, typically with some measure of "ownership" of its display port. On the other hand, a utility typically does a single thing, produces some output, and then exits.
dtrx - Do The Right Extraction. It's a tool "for Unix-like systems that takes all the hassle out of extracting archives": https://brettcsmith.org/2007/dtrx/
In Debian/Ubuntu you can install via apt.
Also, I'd second tldr which has been mentioned here already. It provides simplified man pages which common usage examples that normally fit on a few lines on screen: https://tldr.sh/
Dtrx is awesome, but is unfortunately slowly dying, as the author seems to have abandoned it -- it can't be installed with pip anymore.
I think I'm going to take it over, just need a name...
Kdtrx: Keep Doing The Right Extraction
Yeah it looks rather unmaintained, but can still be installed via apt on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. So yeah should be fine for a few years to come if you are a Ubuntu user (the system I use, I have no idea about other distros).
tar xf <archive> works with all types of tar compressed files.
units
Doing any kind of engineering or science, this is my go to calculator for stuff that I find a lot of people using google for
todo.txt - todo list manager with extensions (e.g. git sync, google tasks integration, etc).
iftop - top for network interfaces.
vnstat - the simplest traffic stat collector I could find.
grep is one of the most useful tools that you can use on the commandline
the elinks browser blew my world a few years ago
vim and tmux!
moc for a music player
calcurse for calendar
mutt for email client
tldr - community-maintained man pages distilled to snippets
I frequently use:
- git
- grep
- head
- man
- rsync
- screen
- sshfs
- tail
- watch
- vim
I recently discovered:
- colordiff
- paste
XTree Gold
sed
Midnight Commander (mc);
nano;
htop;
dstat;
git;
tmux;
pine
here is a list of all tools mentioned in the thread. unfortunately, including descriptions and links made the comment to large, so for now just the names. the number in front is the number of mentions.
links to other lists:
https://beyondgrep.com/feature-comparison/
https://code.kiwi.com/lesser-known-tools-we-love-at-kiwi-com...
https://github.com/agarrharr/awesome-cli-apps#terminal-utili...
https://github.com/alebcay/awesome-shell#applications
https://paste.pound-python.org/raw/Uqc8XTFk73Y3PpbRe9hC/
https://www.networkworld.com/article/3091139/linux/who-needs...
2048
2fa
abcde
abook
[3] ack (ack-grep)
[5] ag (silver searcher)
alex
[2] alpine
[2] amigamml
aplay
archiver
[4] aria2c
asciinema
[2] asdf
atom
[2] autojump (aka j)
autossh
autosub
[3] awk
awless
[2] bash
bash-it
bass
[5] bat (cat)
bcal
[3] bc -l
[2] beets
bitlbee
[3] BorgBackup
[2] bpython
[2] brew
btrfs
buku
[2] byobu
calcurse
cal
cat
[2] cd
Chocolatey
[2] climate (shell utility tools)
[3] cmus
Coinmon
colordiff
column
comm
convert
[2] cowsay
cp
[4] curl
GNU datamash
ddgr
ddrescue
dict
diff
diff2html
direnv
diskus
docker
[2] Doom Emacs
dosage
dstat
[2] dtrx
[2] duplicacy
ed
[2] elinks
[7] emacs
[2] entr
[2] exa
[2] exiftool
fab
Farbfeld Utilities
[3] fasd
[5] fd
[5] ffmpeg
finch
[2] find
findutils
[8] fish-shell
frp
fselect
[6] fzf
gawk
[13] git
git-annex
git-annex assistant
git-bulk-toolkit
git number
[3] gitsh
Git Standup
glances (top)
Goaccess
go-jira
tuijam
[2] googler
gpg
graphicsmagick
[2] grc
[5] grep
Gron
gst123
gzip
hangups (instant messaging)
hd -c
head
heirloom-mailx
hledger
hollywood (tmux UI)
howdoi
hr
[11] htop
[4] httpie
hub
Hugo
hyperfine
iftop
[2] ImageMagick
imgpaste
imgp
import-mailbox-to-gmail
inotifywait
Insect (unit converter)
ip
irssi + jmp.chat
iw
journalctl
[7] jq
kakoune
keysniffer
keychain
khal
khard
Kubectx
[2] lazygit
ledger-cli
links2
lnav
localhost.run
locate
[3] ls
[2] lsof
lumail
Ly
man
mcabber
mediainfo
[2] megadl
mg
[4] midnight commander
Miller (CSV tool)
mkdir
mlocate
[2] mocp
Moon Buggy (game)
moreutils
[3] mosh
[2] most
mountsshfs
mpv
multitail
[5] mutt
mv
[3] mycli
[6] nano
[3] nc
ncat
[7] ncdu
ncmpcpp
neofetch
neomutt + notmuch
[2] neovim
netcat
nethogs
newsboat
[4] Ngrok
nload
nmap
[3] nnn
notmuch
nyancat
od
ohmyfish
[4] ohmyzsh
oh-my-zsh git plugin
[2] open
p7zip
[2] Pandoc
GNU parallel
[5] pass
passgo
pass-otp
paste
pbedit
pbpaste
pdd
pdfgrep
peco
peerflix
[3] perl
[3] pgcli
pgrep
pianobar
pine
ping
pip
pipe
pkill
playmod
prettyping
prezto
progress
proselint
psql
[2] ptpython/ptipython
[4] pv
[2] pwgen
pytest
[2] python
pythonPackages.powerline
qemu
[4] ranger
rclone
recoll
[2] remind
[2] rename
renameutils
[2] restic
[13] rg (ripgrep)
rm
[4] rsync
rtorrent
rtv
sage
Saw (AWS Cloudwatch)
sc-im
sclack
SCM Breeze
[2] Scoop
[4] screen
[4] sed
serve
serveo
[3] shellcheck
SHPaint
shuf
[3] sl
[4] socat
solaar
sort
sox
[2] sqlite shell
[2] ssh
[3] sshfs
subliminal
supmua
surfraw
sym
systemctl
tabview
tail
[2] tar
[3] Taskwarrior
tcpdump
tee
TeX
[2] The Fuck
[6] tig
[4] tldr
tmate
[21] tmux
todo.txt
toilet
top
totp-cli
touch
[2] tr
[2] tree
tshark
ts
ttp
ttyclock
ttysolitaire
rainbowstream
unimatrix
uniq
[2] units
up
vdirsyncer
[2] vi
vifm
[7] vim
[4] Visidata
vnstat
Vue-cli
[2] w3m
[6] watch
watch (python)
watchman
wd
webcomix
[2] websocketd
WebTorrent
[3] weechat
[2] wee-slack
[2] wget
wordgrinder
wttr
[2] xargs
Xdg
xdotool
xiki
xmlstarlet
xrdb
[2] xsv
XTree Gold
xxd
xz
[6] Youtube-dl
youtube-viewer
[2] z
zamzar-bash
zgen
zplug
[4] zshi just discovered some awesome tools in the moreutils package mentioned elsewhere in this discussion:
sponge: soaks up stdin, so you can pipe it back to the same file you just read. compare:
another is:grep -v "^me:" /etc/passwd > /etc/passwd # failed attempt to remove user *me*. grep -v "^me:" /etc/passwd | sponge /etc/passwd # this works because sponge will wait until the grep is completed before writing back to the file.vipe: insert vi into a pipe to do some manual editing of the data while it's handled in a pipe. could also be useful to preview pipe contents while they are being processed.
moreutils also includes vidir, an alternative to qmv.
greetings, eMBee.
psql
pipe
jq
It saved my life.
netcat
the one that comes with nmap?
Doesn't matter because every re-implementation of that old unix tool is made for same purpose and mostly accept same arguments.
For example you can make tar archive and pipe it to nc. On other server nc would accept data and pipe it to tar for unpack. This shows real power of unix pipes.
I asked, because the one from nmap actually supports multiplexing.
- https://github.com/haskellcamargo/sclack to avoid using Slack's garbage desktop client
ripgrep like grep but faster https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
I wouldn't call it among the best, but it has a real-life use, and was, and maybe still is, used in production by a large motorcycle manufacturer, for whom I originally wrote it:
https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-ibm-developerworks-ar...
I had given some more details about it on HN some time ago: