The suggestions in the comments are all nice, but the biggest game changer for me was nushell. Once you understand how it works there is no going back. I have saved so many hours already.
Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Oh boy. This is a rabbit hole which, once you fall into, there's no coming back out.
There is a world of terminal software. You can, quite reasonably, get entirely rid of X (and Wayland) and live in the console. Honestly, the reason I don't is only because there is no fully competent terminal web browser (although there are some quite good ones), and because anything having to do with graphics like photo management, or vector graphics drawing, is really where GUIs are useful. But for everything else, terminal clients are almost always superior.
Choosing a good terminal emulator is important, and the best one right now is Rio. It's fast, smaller memory footprint, and less CPU use than Wezterm or Kitty, and it supports ligatures, iTerm, and SIXEL graphics.
In that goes tmux, because it works over ssh and having consistent everywhere is handy, because it survives terminal and window manager crashes, and because you can open multiple clients in different windows on the same tmux session.
In that runs zsh, because it's the best shell. It's backwards-compatible to bash, but has a ton of extra features.
I'm conservative about replacing standard POSIX tools with new fad tools, because grep is literally everywhere (even BusyBox) and new things usually aren't; but ripgrep and fd are such nice improvements over grep and find I've been unable to resist. Helix is currently the best text editor. However, having a good familiarity with grep, find, and vi is IMHO critical, because they're the foundations.
My media player is ostui, which is an ncurses SubSonic client with synced lyrics and cover art support. I use catnip for visualization, because it uses less memory and CPU than cava. For task management I use a bespoke script (tdp) that use fzf with todo.txt files. I use gotop for system monitoring.
I try to use chawan for terminal web browsing, and it does do CSS layout better than most, and supports sixel image rendering, but it's often a chore so I mostly browse in Luakit, which is a GUI program.
rook is my secret service tool that uses a KeePassXC DB as the backing store, and provides credentials to everything that needs them.
- vdirsyncer syncs my calendar and contracts to a VPS, and thence to my phone
- mbsync syncs all of my email from my IMAP server, and I use notmuch to index and tag it
- khard is a terminal address book that uses standard vcard directories
- lbb is a super-fast address book search tool which also works on vcard directories
- khal is a TUI calendar app, which works with vcal directories
- aerc, which someone else mentioned, is a fantastic TUI email client that can use notmuch.
- tasker is what I use for scheduled cron control; it uses standard crontab files.
- devmon and udevil handle automounts of USB media
- mosh is a UDP-based ssh, with interruptable sessions and network resilience
- mpdris2-rs is the agent I use to hook up various media control tooling to ostui (which supports the mpris protocol) and other players - mpris is a sort of standardized glue for media players.
- gomuks is an excellent TUI for Matrix
- weechat is a TUI for IRC. I prefer gomuk's interface, but you can get a Matrix plugin for weechat if you want to use only one. I find I often have to restart weechat because otherwise it end up eating all of the memory; there's a memory leak, or something in it.
- syncthing-daemon for syncing between almost everything
- restic for backups
dinit handles all of my user task management, because systemd is fucking broken for user tasks. dinit is a better init system.
Almost every application I use is a cli or TUI client. The exceptions are the web browser, for reasons I've explained; Jami, which doesn't have a CLI client; Factorio, which is a game; and darktable for photo management. I'll also occasionally open Gimp or Inkscape for graphics, vlc for movies (which I could probably watch in the terminal, now that I think of it), and I usually view PDFs in a GUI client such as mupdf.
My philosophy on software is to use standards wherever possible. I avoid programs that insist on using their own DBs when there's a perfectly good standard, such as ics, maildir, and so on. It's just another form of vender lock-in. Hence notmuch (maildir), khard and lbb (directory of .ics), khal (directory of .vcs), rook (KeePass DB), and so on. This drives most of my tooling choices.
du-dust - disk usage (written in R U S T ⚙️) bottom/btm - htop/top replacement zed editor obs-studio (not CLI exactly)
lazydocker:
terminal based docker managementncdu
: disk usage analyzernmtui
: terminal based network managementbrowsh
: terminal based web browser with headless Firefox backend
I prefer dua
over ncdu
, specially when called interactively (dua i
), since you can explore the results in parallel before it finishes scanning, while it updates asynchronously.
I do like btop for performance monitoring, your comment somehow reminded me
I really like btop/bpytop too. Its more useful than glances imo.
I always click on it from the start menu, forgot it was terminal based
I rely on cli tools for a lot of things too. Here's a list:
tmux: terminal multiplexer
zsh (with fzf zsh completion): shell
fzf: fuzzy finder
doas: sudo replacement
bat: cat replacement
fd: find replacement
advcpmv: cp/mv replacement
eza: ls replacement
zenith: htop replacement
trash-cli: trash management
neomutt: email client (notmuch is a most recommended addition)
neovim (and plugins): text/code editor
buku: internet bookmarks manager
tut: mastodon client
ucollage: image viewer
udevil: (un)mounting removable devices and networks without a password
magic-tape: youtube search/download and more
rofi: used with scripts to do a lot of things
pass: password manager
yazi: file explorer
iwd: wireless manager
khal: calendar and webdav sync with vdirsyncer
taskjuggler: complete task manager
newsboat: feed aggregator
fwupd: firmware updater
chawan: web browser
ncmpcpp: mpd-client
duf: disk usage
abook: contacts manager
I have some of them detailed here.
This GitHub also has a long list.
Edit: added abook and duf to the list
My list is a bit software developer-centric, but can be useful for development-adjacent tasks too.
- The Github CLI - great for doing routine GH work, like opening PRs or filing issues.
- glab - ditto for Gitlab.
- jq - JSON parsing, formatting, searching and modification.
- pup - like jq, but for HTML pages.
- sed - A powerful text find-and-replace tool with regular expressions.
- scp - File transfers over SSH.
- xargs - run a command for every line of output from another command. Great for automating manual tasks.
- curl - make any type of HTTP (and many other protocols) request from the command line.
- tar - compress/uncompress archive files.
- pwgen - generate passwords with lots of options.
- uuidgen - generate universally unique ids.
- exiftool - read and modify image/video/audio file metadata. Good for adding/editing tags/albums/dates/etc.
Unpopular opinion maybe: many of the suggestions here are not worth the time.
Buy I'll add one to the mix: yt-dlp
I use a lot to download YouTube videos. Very robust.
It even works on other sites. I haven't run into mainstream site it doesn't support.
Feel free to tell them why and help fill us in on whats better lol, im sure no one minds finding better, or is it because youd rather use an app or website?
Great tool. It's also leveraged by pinchflat, where you add Youtube channels via a webui and it downloads their videos and adds them to Jellyfin.
Some I haven't seen mentioned yet:
- bottom, a process manager written in rust.
- starship.rs, a smart prompt that works with most shells. Fish is my fav.
- broot. A unique file explorer and search.
- dua-cli a space analyzer.
- fdupes . Find and remove duplicate files.
Xargs, bc, paste, sed, awk.
I often work with media files. These are some tools I really like in this domain:
- Exiftool Best metadata editor around. And it's basically a single massive perl script...
- MediaInfo Metadata viewer specifically for AV Files. Comes with a GUI viewer but also works just from the command line.
- FFprobe part of the ffmpeg project. For getting information about streams in AV files
- ImageMagick For editing/convertig images.
- G'Mic Also for image processing. But more for creative stuff.
- GStreamer (gst-launch for running pipelines) AV Stream manipulation, Video Editing
- DNGLab For convertig RAW Images to DNG. Its the only one I found that works well with fujifilm RAF files (and its fast)
- SoX Swiss Army Knife of sound processing
- Gltfpack For reducing the size of gltf files (3d meshes)
I'm a big fan of jq. It's a domain-specific language for manipulating JSON data.
ImageMagick is like ffmpeg but for images.
inotify-tools has command-line utilities that can be used in a Bash script or a Bash one-liner to make arbitrary things "happen" when something "happens" to a file or directory. (Then the file is opened or written to or renamed or whatever.)
I probably should mention rsync. It's like a swiss army knife for copying files from one place to another. And it supports "keeping files syncronized" between two locations.
Of course, there's tons of stuff that you pretty much can't talk about Bash scripting without mentioning. Sed, awk, grep, find, etc.
Also, I totally relate about the terminal giving more dopamine. I kinda just hate going on a point-and-click adventure to do things like image editing or whatever. To the point that I've written a whole-ass domain-specific-language to do what I want rather than use Gimp. (And I'm working on another whole-ass domain-specific-language to do a traditionally-GUI-app sort of task.)
A bunch of GNU tools have added JSON output and it's so good. Like, GNU column
can take tabular data and convert it into JSON really easily. It's like the perfect text stream.
OMG how did I not know this... It just might be time to switch to nushell/elvish.
jq
is indispensable.
Midnight Commander (mc) is a classic file manager if you grew up in the 90s with Norton Commander on DOS.
For my local Git repositories I prefer lazygit
now. There’s also a plethora of other lazy* tools for e.g. Docker.
And you should maybe look at dialog
or whiptail
to spice up your shell scripts.
If you do Python, there’s the rich
library and there’s also pythondialog
. Both pretty easy to use. If you want more, there’s textual
.
EDIT: mutt
for emails is nice once you’ve managed to set it up.
Yeah i never used norton commander so mc was a bit rough looking for me, but it was the first one I saw and why I found yazi, ranger, etc. There are a ton of them, just listed the few i tried
Yeah, I’m trying to build some muscle memory in yazi
, too, as I like its instant previews.
I’ve also just remembered this website that has lots of other cool terminal tools:
helix . modal text editor similar to vim, but with less configuration required
Not only less configuration required, but also semantic navigation (jump around the AST directly with simple keybindings). I can't use a code editor without it now.
semantic navigation (jump around the AST directly with simple keybindings).
just searched up abstract syntax tree in helix, and i learned about syntax aware motions. how had i never heard of them before? they look very useful! thanks for mentioning that
GNU Parallel: It lets you run multiple things in parallel. It's very useful for batch converting large numbers of files.
Ripgrep (rg) instead of grep or ack. Stupid fast.
yt-dlp since I don't see it mentioned.
Drop tmux and use zellij (if you are scared of tmux, zellij is easier to learn IMO).
Git: lazygit
Docker management : lazydocker
Well, seeing them in the list like that rubs me the wrong way. 😅
Both of those come with a CLI, called git
and docker
respectively, which is the official way of using them. These CLIs might not be particularly sexy, depending on who you ask, but they're decent enough and worth learning, even if you go the lazy*
route, since online resources all just explain the official CLIs and you might find yourself one day administering remote systems where you can't install additional software...
streamrip
for ripping music from streaming services
pdftk is fantastic for merging and splitting pdfs (among other things)
Amazing tool but sadly abandoned and slowly getting more and more unstable and difficult to build
The better options:
- Stapler (which also hasn't been updated in a few years) is a version implemented in python
- pdftk-idk is a slightly more active implementation in java
I've been meaning to try out netpbm
If you aren't aware, pbm represents an image with plaintext, which makes it great for when you want to easily create an image with code
I recently learned there is a whole suite of CLI tools which work with the format. Like conversion to/from png, scaling, and overlaying one image on top of another.
nvtop
: visualize nvidia GPU usage and memory
top
: monitor/manage processes although ps aux | grep appName
is still my goto.
pyenv
: easily install and use any python version
ipython
: a customizable python interpreter. I have figured out many poorly documented modules using ipython and great for exploring modules.
Import psutil as ps
ps.#then hit tab
after hitting tab will show all attributes related to your imported module, use arrow keys to select methods == profit!
nethogs
: monitor network connections by app.
firejail
: app sandboxing
bluetuith
is great for managing Bluetooth devices.
emacs is great, from your list it can do at least email/file management/file editing/git/piracy/python/web browser
Well, I used vi a lot, but seriously nano is better especially for beginner.
I also use DoubleCommander instead of midnight one
Nano supremacy! Keep it simple!
Good old nano is something i use a lot, although i am considering finally giving micro a try, heard a lot of good things about it, and i want something with a bit more features in the terminal, but i really hate vim keybinds. I also really like rmpc, which is an mpd client with album art support, though i am not using it anymore at the moment because i realized mpd wasn't really what i was looking for when it comes to music players.
Edit: also want to mention cyanrip. Really good cli cd ripper with a lot sane defaults, easy to use, and in terms of accuracy probably the closest thing to EAC on windows.
s-tui is also great. It's a tui stress testing utility. I still use it every now and then even if it's just to test if my fan curve is actually working by putting some load on the cpu.
zoxide
. It's cd
but better. It remembers which directories you've navigated to, and fuzzy finds them.
So instead of typing:
cd /really/long/path/to/sime/dir
You can type:
zoxide dir
And it'll take you right to the directory.
I've got it aliased to zd
so I type:
zd dir
And I'm there.
Pretty sure zoxide automatically uses “z” as its alias by default. One less letter for you to type.
You can save tons of time by adding aliases to your .gitconfig
such as 'ga $fname' (where "fname" would be files you want to add) the alias for git add. You can also do the same thing with gc, gs, etc and if youre like me and you write dozens of lines of code a day, it can save you a lot of time.
I've already aliased gl
for git log with my flags, but have been too lazy to add more aliases.
Oh. I did not know that. Gonna try that right now.