Linux

A few that I use every day:

• Fish shell
• Starship.rs
• Broot (a brilliant filesystem navigator)
• Helix editor (My favorite editor / IDE, truly the successor to vim IMO)
• Topgrade (updates everything)

I use fuck to fix typos

The pipe (|), which if you think about it is the basis for function composition.

awk

jq?

Control+r == search through your bash history.

I used linux for ten years before finding out about that one.

I find myself using tldr a lot since finding out about it. It's just so useful for commands that I don't use enough to commit to memory.

I know tmux is incredibly popular, but a good use case for it that isn’t common is teaching people how to do things in the terminal. You can both be attached to the same tmux session, and both type into the same shell.

zoxide. It's a fabulous cd replacement. It builds a database as you navigate your filesystem. Once you've navigated to a directory, instead of having to type cd /super/long/directory/path, you can type zoxide path and it'll take you right to /super/long/directory/path.

I have it aliased to zd. I love it and install it on every system

You can do things like using a partial directory name and it'll jump you to the closest match in the database. So zoxide pa would take you to /super/long/directory/path.

And you can do partial paths. Say you've got two directories named data in your filesystem.

One at /super/long/directory/path1/data

And the other at /super/long/directory/path2/data

You can do zoxide path2 data and you'll go to /super/long/directory/path2/data

I don't see anyone mentions htop. So, I will:) Just works, could be installed in any distro. Much more friendly than top but isn't bloated with features as some other alternatives are.

CTRL-L to clear your terminal output. Or type clear

yq is crazy cool for converting between different text-based data formats such as yaml, json, xml, csv and others, and it has a super nice pretty-printing function as well. I use it all the time!

Just be aware that your distroy might come with a yq variant too, but possibly one that isn't as powerful as the one I linked. I know this to be true at least for Ubuntu.

bc

It's a simple command line calculator! I use it all the time.

yes

The most positive command you'll ever use.

Run it normally and it just spams 'y' from the keyboard. But when one of the commands above is piped to it, then it will respond with 'y'. Not every command has a true -y to automate acceptance of prompts and that's what this is for.

Man

+1 for Caddy, completely replaced nginx. also...

• Starship - shell prompt
• tmux - terminal multiplexer
• parallel - parallel command runner
• restic - backup tool
• age - modern file encryption

vd (VisiData) is a wonderful TUI spreadsheet program. It can read lots of formats, like csv, sqlite, and even nested formats like json. It supports Python expressions and replayable commands.

I find it most useful for large CSV files from various sources. Logs and reports from a lot of the tools I use can easily be tens of thousands of rows, and it can take many minutes just to open them in GUI apps like Excel or LibreOffice.

I frequently need to re-export fresh data, so I find myself needing to re-process and re-arrange it every time, which visidata makes easy (well, easier) with its replayable command files. So e.g. I can write a script to open a raw csv, add a formula column, resize all columns to fit their content, set the column types as appropriate, and sort it the way I need it. So I can do direct from exporting the data to reading it with no preprocessing in between.

Pandoc, FFMpeg, ImageMagick

Using rust rewrite of coreutils you can cp -g to see progress. Set an alias :)

I love ncdu for seeing where all my storage is being taken up.

tmux - makes managing remote SSH sessions a breeze.

tomb - A little FOSS encryption utility that runs in the CLI. Easy, cute, effective. Tomb Utility

I think socat is a really powerful und underrated tool

sshfs

dd is probably well known, but one of the simplest and most powerful ways to accidentally delete all data on your hard drive. dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda

ncdu

kde connect

Discovered about rg recently and it is cool!

socat - connect anything to anything

for example

socat - tcp-connect:remote-server:12345

socat tcp-listen:12345 -

socat tcp-listen:12345 tcp-connect:remote-server:12345

pipeviewer or pv

• awk
• the (usually rust-based) coreutils "alternatives" like bat, fd, eza, procs
• trash-put (rm with trash integration. But beware that it also operates on directories by default, which rm only does with -r. There should be an option to change that behavior but there isn't. Don't alias rm to this)
• wl-copy/paste (or the older one for X11, 'xclip' IIRC. Enables you to do stuff like "cat image.jpg | wl-copy" to copy it to the clipboard. Best alias it to something shorter)
• xdg-open (open the file using your associated program for that file type. Alias to "o" or so)
• pass (awesome password manager, when you have a GPG key pair. Even better in combination with e.g. wofi)
• notify-send (to send GUI notifications from shell scripts)
• ledger (plain-text accounting software. If you use Emacs you should take a look at this as it's written by an Emacs dev, and has good integration of course)
• nc
• nohup

• xargs
• parallel
• PXE (ohai cobbler)
• tee
• task-spooler (ts aka tsp)
• rpm -V

Nothing new, just forgotten.

Find

batcat

It's like cat but better. Great for when you just want to look at the contents of a file, without loading a whole text editor.

Oh also, tldr

My procedure for learning how to use a cli command goes tldr page -> --help if the tldr fails to help me -> THEN the full manpage

xargs

netstat -tunl shows all open ports on the machine to help diagnose any firewall issues.

Pandoc.

tmsu is pretty cool - it creates a little db and uses that to track tags on your files without ever touching them. It also has it's own little tag based filesystem.

Underrated? I'd say lftp is the best FTP command line client there is. And Midnight Commander is a very very good file browser. I don't see either praised enough.

GNU datamash (https://www.gnu.org/software/datamash/alternatives/) - handy tool for data munching. There's also https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv