My Ten Favorite Command-Line Utilities
29 June 2019
Depending on tools that you use, Terminal can either make you productive or slow you down. Below you will find ten command-line tools and utils that make me more productive.
1️⃣ tldr is a better and simpler version of man pages
. When I forget how to use a certain unix utility, such as chmod
, there is no better solution than typing tldr chmod
.
2️⃣ fx is an awesome JSON processor for the command line. You can display, filter, and transform JSON without leaving the command line.
3️⃣ autojump is a cd
command on steroids. autojump
learns which directories you use and makes switching between them easier.
4️⃣ exa is a modern replacement for ls
. It looks nicer, uses colours to distinguish file types and metadata, knows about symlinks, extended attributes, and Git.
5️⃣ bat is a modern replacement for cat
. It supports syntax highlighting for a large number of programming and markup languages.
6️⃣ fd is a better and simpler version of find
. I still can’t use find
effectively after being a Linux user for 10 years, but I have no problems understanding fd
.
7️⃣ fzf is a fuzzy finder for a command-line or an interactive version of grep
. It’s a great tool to filter stuff like logs, process stats, or files, because unlike grep, you can type as you think and look through the current results. Like a boss: fd . ~/Desktop | fzf
.
8️⃣ tmux allows me to open and manage multiple split-views in one terminal. Spend 15 minutes learning tmux
and boost your productivity 10x.
9️⃣ micro is a modern and intuitive terminal-based text editor. If you don’t like Vim, Emacs and Nano, you’ll like micro
. It even has a mouse support!
🔟 httpie is an awesome Http client for the command-line. It’s a curl alternative with intuitive syntax, JSON support, syntax highlighting, and wget-like downloads.
⤵️ Bonus utils for awesome developers
🎁 fselect is a utility for searching files with SQL-like syntax. Isn’t the following query self-describing? fselect name from . where name = '*.mp3' and size gt 1mb
Enjoy!