Let's make a list of our favorite CLI utilities.

attn_dfct_dev, 11 months ago

• scoop - closest to apt on Windows
• yt-dlp - active fork of youtube-dl
• neofetch - System information display
• winfetch - Same as neofetch, but for windows
• pandoc - Ultimate converter
• ffmpeg - must have tool
• taskwarrior - best task manager imho

mim, 11 months ago

Taskwarrior.

FiveAcres, 11 months ago

In Bash, I like to use cdargs

sudo apt-get install cdargs

It allows you to set up shortcuts on the fly,

cv sdbackup

rather than cd /media/user/Backup Plus/ MyFiles/current/sdbackup

cv with no argument will give you a list to select from current shortcuts

dark776174657273, 10 months ago

Of those mentioned, this one intrigues me most. Thanks!

RandomDevOpsDude, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

I write a lot of bash scripts that end up running in automation in some fashion.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -euxo pipefail

Is pretty standard for me.

-e exit on error

-o pipefail exit on pipeline fail

-u error on unset variables

-x trace

fallenpixel, 11 months ago

Always partial to yq and jq. No easier way to interact with kubernetes outputs on the fly.

Andy, 11 months ago

I don't know about k8s work in particular, but I enjoy jello and yamlpath more than jq and yq.

nevalem, 10 months ago

Don’t forget about fq!

RandomDevOpsDude, 11 months ago

How I have never heard of yq, I'm unsure, but thank you as I'm sure it will make life easier

Algae, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

My answers (mostly running in powershell - not that it makes much of a difference!)

Rust-based utilities I couldn't live without:

• fd (fd-find) for finding my files
• rg (ripgrep) for string searches
• sd (sed) for search and replace
• dust (dust) for information about my directories
• lsd (aliased to ) for replacing Dir
• bat (better cat) - for when the help pages are too long

Other stuff I love:

• htop - I just learned you can run this in WSL to see all your system cores. It's pretty!
• nvim - obviously. The best vim. Even works in VSCode

sisyphean, 11 months ago

I really like jless. You can pipe the JSON output of a cURL command into it and it displays it in a really nice, easy to read way with collapsible arrays and objects.

cd_slash_rmrf, 11 months ago

if you spend a lot of time in the shell, i like using the following for easier directory traversal:

• fzf and its shell bindings for fuzzy-matching arguments
• https://github.com/rupa/z for jumping to "frecent" directories
• https://github.com/agkozak/zsh-z (a native zsh port of z)
• https://github.com/Tarrasch/zsh-bd for going back directories

and some zsh settings which make cd silently act like pushd/popd:

# autopushd         : make cd act like pushd (alias doesn't work properly)
# pushdminus        : use -1 instead of +1
# pushdsilent       : prevents printing stack on each cd
# pushdtohome       : `pushd` to ~/
# pushdignoredups   : dont add duplicates to stack

gamma, 11 months ago

I want to add setopt autocd, and hash -d name=/some/long/path/to/name to create your own ~name shortcuts.

cd_slash_rmrf, 11 months ago

woa, i didn't even know about hash -d name=/path, neat!

gamma, 11 months ago

pv, which is like cat, simply copying files or stdin to stdout, but prints statistics to the terminal.

A related tip: dd isn't special in the way most people use it. This works too, if you're root: pv my-fav-distro.iso > /dev/sdc

chaoticAnimals, 11 months ago

I'm a pretty big fan of icdiff. This utility allows you to compare two files to see what has been added or removed by using colorful fonts to highlight values.

https://github.com/jeffkaufman/icdiff

cd_slash_rmrf, 11 months ago

I recently learned about diffsitter which uses tree-sitter for meaningful diffs

chaoticAnimals, 11 months ago

Nice. Ty!

Andy, 11 months ago

Another good one is riff (riffdiff on crates.io).

EDIT: for single-column view, that is