Big fan of commandline tools such as vim, htop etc. What is in your opinion must have tools?
I have mostly replaced all command line stuff with Emacs, but there are still a few CLI utilities that I continue to use, whether I am in the CLI directly or whether I am using Emacs:
tmux
orscreen
(terminal multiplexing)bash
(shell scripting)grep
,sed
(filtering, formatting)ps
,pgrep
,pkill
(process control)ls
,find
,du
(filesystem search)ssh
,nc
,rsync
,sshfs
,sftp
(remote access, file transfer)tee
,dd
(pipe control)less
,emacs
,diff
,patch
,pandoc
(text editing)man
,apropos
(manual)tar
,gzip
,bzip2
,xz
(archiving)hexdump
,base64
,basenc
,sha256sum
(data encoding, checksums)wget
,curl
, (HTTP client)dpkg
,apt-get
,guix
(package management)mpv
(media player)ldd
,objdump
,readelf
(inspecting binary files)zfs
(maintaining my backup filesystem)
fzf for quickly matching file names especially deep in the directory hierarchy
ripgrep for quickly searching for text content within files
dtrx for handling the right extractions of different archive types
What is the difference between
ripgrep
and just plain grep?Even better, there is ripgrep-all that can also search in binary files like PDFs and office documents: https://github.com/phiresky/ripgrep-all
ripgrep
is a reimplementation ofgrep
in Rust. It benchmarks faster for large file searches and also comes with quality of life features like syntax highlighting by default.It also ignores files in .gitignore and some others by default
It also has a much simpler and forgiving syntax. Just type
rg anything
and it finds anything
k9s is a game changer
Love k9s! I just pull dnit down and used it again today.
- gcalcli : helps accessing google calendar using calendar api
- neix : rss reader
- I don’t know if it counts but : fish shell
I basically live in
nvim
. Being able to configure my editor in an actual programming language makes it so much more useful to me thanvim
could ever be.I found lua to be a better programming language, but the text specific design of vimscript makes way more sense to my brain.
Yes, Vimscript is way more intuitive than Lua in a lot of ways. And as far as programming languages go, Lua has some strange design choices that I’m not the biggest fan of, either. However, it really does open up a lot of possibilities when your configuration is programmatic.
zoxide, makes file navigating so much easier.
btop is gorgeous ofc.
cheat, for cheat-sheets.
I really like
entr
- “Run arbitrary commands when files change”Ranger and/or vifm as file managers. Can’t live without them
I personally like bat, fd, rsync, btm, btop, rg, and nix. Nix is a package manager tho, so that’s a whole bag of worms.
They might have specific uses that most users might not need and there may be better alternatives but some of the ones I’ve been using are:
CISO - A command line tool for making compressed ISO files that can be used in emulators and some video game consoles running custom firmware.
RAR - The Linux version of WinRAR, which doesn’t have a UI like the Windows version does.
Flatpak - Probably well known but in case a newer Linux user sees this, it’s used to download and install flatpaks from Flathub.
i use kibi as a text editor
not a cli tool, but i also have a terminal client called alacritty
also doas instead of sudo