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.
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 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.
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.
I still use fish for scripting as its syntax is far more casual looking.
# Bash:
FOO=bar ./command
# Equivalent in bash and fish:
env FOO=bar ./commandThat includes support for && and || and a few other things that should go a long way towards making most code you find drop-in ready.
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.
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.
> 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.
If you use a lot of addons, this can load up prompts faster without losing any OMZ goodness.
FWIW, here's my .zshrc. https://github.com/dancek/dotfiles/blob/master/.zshrc
- 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...
https://github.com/sharkdp/fd
https://github.com/sharkdp/bat
https://github.com/sharkdp/diskus
https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine
I use peco for this https://github.com/peco/peco , thanks for sharkdp checking those out.
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/keysniffer
So easy and super convienient if you quickly need your local server accessible from somewhere else.
(not affiliated, I just really admire ngrok so I take it personally when people don't use it :))
for a self hosted option, I've also been using https://github.com/fatedier/frp lately.
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/]
CLIs are command driven. TUIs are driven by user interactions. I'm sure more/better distinctions between the two can be made.
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.
greetings, eMBee.
> 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'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.
But yes, in general, a shell is just much better:)
that a thousand times!
does wayland work in that direction?
"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’ve always liked the idea of moving my email to mutt and using personal domains, but not convinced I could manage spam well.
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.
- 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!
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.
Compare the respective directories in https://github.com/philippgille/serve.
> 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.
It is shocking how much equipment gets drivers and then never gets updated and no one has the time or money to update them..
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!
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.
#!/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 = '"'$1'"';' | sqlite3 /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/twht79zd.default/places.sqlite`
}
f$# $1
However, is also my opinion making many thing which do not need a web browser and can just be the command-line programs.
So I assume you made it work like Dropbox for you anyway. How did that go?
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.
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
Takes a log time to digest the man page, but once you have you can do anything.
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.
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.:
echo *arithmetic_expression* | bc -l
Edit: 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
14mutt 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.
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
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"
alias glol="git log --oneline"
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'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 -d alias ..="cd .."
alias ..2="cd ../.."
# ... you get the idea, mine goes up to 5
function mkcd () { mkdir -p "$@" && eval cd "\"\$$#\""; }
alias h="history|grep" function up() { cd "$(printf '../'%.0s $(seq 1 "${1:-1}"))" && pwd; } #up 4 goes up 4 directories alias ...="cd ../.."
alias ....="cd ../../.."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...
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.
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.
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.
* 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)'https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-with/
Sometimes, using a GUI is easier than a CLI :)
history | awk '{a[$2]++} END{for (i in a) print a[i]"\t"i}' | sort -n | tailI'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...
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.
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...
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....
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
];du -k --max-depth=2 * | sort -rn | head
Ymmv, but playing around with max-depth is usually enough to find the culprit for me.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
I've taken this list to be of thing things that run in a terminal rather than strictly non-interactive programs.
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)
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
What about using `ping host`? This also prints the ip
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.
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.
greetings, eMBee.
If I were to use their query-based API, and just be a UI on it, then that'd be an almost complete rewrite.
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.
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.
Similarly jq (https://stedolan.github.io/jq/) for JSON data is great.
* 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.
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...
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.
Magnificent app which corrects your previous console command
https://github.com/benp44/git-bulk-toolkit
shameless plug alert
watch df -h
watch ls -sh
watch cat file
watch nmcli device wifi list
watch -n 10 --color curl -s wttr.inWorks on BSD `tail` too. :)
watch ps fx
A Python version of the Linux watch command:
https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-python-version-of-linu...
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
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.
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... )
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).
(Disclaimer: I build homebrew, apt, etc packages for VisiData.)
(this is just something I found recently, not affiliated with it or anything)
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.
https://github.com/jethrokuan/z (fish port)
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 :)
- 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
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.
Have you seen the readme? There's an animated gif showing how it works, and a more detailed description.
> 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?
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!
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.
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/
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.
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!
(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.
In that sense, lazygit is more navigation friendly.
- 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.
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)"'; donehttps://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.
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.
Coinmon (Requires node) - https://github.com/bichenkk/coinmon
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.
Another one is ffmpeg. A ton of tools are built on it.
For photographers exiftool is great.
notmuch - email database
ncmpcpp - MPD frontend (music player)
taskwarrior - task and time management
mutt - email
ranger - file manager
pass - password managerproselint: http://proselint.com/
alex: https://github.com/get-alex/alex
Both are CLI linters for prose.
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.
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.
2) SHPaint -- ANSI Art editor programmed in bash.[1,2]
[0] http://www.seehuhn.de/pages/moon-buggy.html
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'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).
Deduplication, compression, encryption, to local or remote targets.
Slightly off topic, but can I just say that iTerm2's native tmux integration is really awesome.
_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
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 $volnamefind test -print0 | xargs -0 file
"This allows file names that contain newlines or other types of white space to be correctly interpreted by programs that process the find output. This option corresponds to the -0 option of xargs."
# remove files without spawning lots of rm processes
find . -name "*.xyz" -print0 -type f| perl -0 -ne 'chomp;print "$_\n";unlink;'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.
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.
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.
If you want something interactive as you work through the book (and even CLI itself), it would be hard to beat bash. ;-)
https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-the-command-line
greetings, eMBee.
Here's a handy chart that compares the features of each of these tools, along with git grep and plain ol' GNU grep.
40.2% ls
22.8% cd
15.6% python
3.6% nano
Nano Vim Xdg youtube-dl wttr git curl top watch
* 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)
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...
% echo 'one\ntwo\nthree' | sed -e 's,$, four,'
one four
two four
three four > echo ‘one\ntwo\nthree’ | tr \n \|
one|two|threejq - 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
https://paste.pound-python.org/raw/Uqc8XTFk73Y3PpbRe9hC/
It's not 100% made up of command-line programs, but most of them are.
Easy to overlook... I almost don't even notice it, but I use it more than any other application (every time I type).
A streaming torrent client. I guess there are similar ones.
Watching a torrent becomes:
peerflix <magnet> --mplayer -t subtitlegst123 [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
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.
> 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.
Awesome lightweight music player
You’ll be sure to find something useful.
- 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)Use numbers for dealing with files in git.
for example, u could pipe in tcpdump output to analyze dump in realtime
* fish shell
* tmux (multiplexer)
* emacs-nox (non-GUI version)
* mocp (music player)
* w3m (web browser)
* htop (process viewer)```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
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
F yeah, dude.
- 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.
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 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.
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.
vi: https://man.openbsd.org/vi
entr: http://entrproject.org/
shellcheck: http://shellcheck.net
it makes renaming of long filenames much easier. especially if there are many files with similar names.
greetings, eMBee.
just run `npm install -g diff2html-cli` and `diff2html`
I recommend this alias `alias diff='diff2html -s side'`
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).
cal - Obvious but I still launch GUI calendar app when I can just type 3 letters to check on dates.
* htop - better version of top for multi-core machines
* tmux - when you want to run long-running commands
asdf - universal installation tool for ruby, node, go, etc
ripgrep - very fast search
zsh - shell (with zsh-autosuggestions and fasd hooks)
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!
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/
I think I'm going to take it over, just need a name...
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
vnstat - the simplest traffic stat collector I could find.
calcurse for calendar
mutt for email client
- git
- grep
- head
- man
- rsync
- screen
- sshfs
- tail
- watch
- vim
I recently discovered:
- colordiff
- paste
nano;
htop;
dstat;
git;
tmux;
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] zshsponge: soaks up stdin, so you can pipe it back to the same file you just read. compare:
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.
It saved my life.
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.
https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2014/09/my-ibm-developerworks-ar...
I had given some more details about it on HN some time ago: