31 ms·

Ask HN: What are your favorite terminal programs?

• unlivingthing 8y ago
  If you like youtube-dl you should have a look at https://github.com/mafintosh/peerflix https://github.com/mafintosh/peerflix !! (:
• DanBC 8y ago
  youtube-dl, get_iplayer. I used to enjoy "orpheus", and MP3 player. That's ncurses, which I think counts. http://thekonst.net/orpheus http://thekonst.net/orpheus
• giahoang 8y ago
  ZSH
• imron 8y ago
  jq - amazingly useful for processing JSON
  • johnbellone 8y ago
    Ah, you beat me to it!
• sairamkunala 8y ago
  rg => (ripgrep) alternative to ack and grep.
  • SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
    There’s also ag (the silver searcher)
    • boyter 8y ago
      I must confess based on the strength of the argument buruntsushi had with the Ripgrep comparison I switched from ag to rg and have not looked back. I was a daily ag user but I don’t need the advanced regex support and I do like the speed.
  • sshine 8y ago
    I love how command-line tools are seeing the same explosion of choices as web-frameworks. I changed to 'ack' six months ago after having used 'grep' for two decades, and already its successor 'ag' has been made redundant in favor of 'rg'. My only peeve with 'ack' is that I can't make it switch nicely between paging and not paging: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50135983/less-waits-when-ack-takes-time-to-finish https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50135983/less-waits-when... I doubt any of 'ack's competitors have a fix for this, since it seems to be a pager feature that I'm looking for.
• hoppelhase 8y ago
  bat https://github.com/sharkdp/bat https://github.com/sharkdp/bat exa http://the.exa.website http://the.exa.website Both are good additions.
• noufalibrahim 8y ago
  https://www.passwordstore.org/ https://www.passwordstore.org/ for passwords.
  • NVRM 8y ago
    oO
• guilevi 8y ago
  MPS-Youtube is extremely useful if you don't mind the CLI and want to quickly play a YouTube video. translate-shell if you're a language person. Very complete interface to most popular translation services. atools(aunpack, apack, als, etc) for quick archive manipulation if you're lazy.
  • pronik 8y ago
    mpv + youtube-dl plugin are also a nice combination, especially for live streams.
    • zouhair 8y ago
      I prefer Streamlink[0] for live streams. [0]: https://github.com/streamlink https://github.com/streamlink
      • cobby 8y ago
        Could you please elaborate why you prefer streamlink over youtube-dl?
        • zouhair 8y ago
          I use them both, it is just youtube-dl is more suited for live streams and youtube-dl is more suited for downloading non-live videos.
• thomas_mcn 8y ago
  youtube-dl dvdbackup
• cdancette 8y ago
  ncdu to analyze disk space and find huge folders you can clean And `z` (the zsh plugin) to cd into your most common directories
  • veganjay 8y ago
    Thanks for sharing - I did not know about ncdu. I typically do a series of "du -s -h * | sort -h" and this simplifies things.
    • philsnow 8y ago
      wow, learned about that flag to sort today, thanks. I've been just doing "du -s | sort -n"
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• gcb0 8y ago
  tig
  • orcs 8y ago
    Link? What's if for?
    • maze-le 8y ago
      Its a CLI interface for git. https://github.com/jonas/tig https://github.com/jonas/tig
      • orcs 8y ago
        Very cool, I like ncurses. Before visiting your link I was like 'isn't git already cli?'
      • ciupicri 8y ago
        I think TUI as in Text User Interface (similar to GUI) would be a more appropriate term than CLI. git is CLI, tig is TUI and gitk is GUI.
    • petepete 8y ago
      It's a text interface for git. Great for quickly navigating around a repo and, the thing I use it for most, staging individual lines/hunks https://github.com/jonas/tig https://github.com/jonas/tig
• brunosutic 8y ago
  Here are some of my favorites that I use daily: - tmux - mutt - email client - wyrd + remind - calendar - ledger - double-entry accounting tool - weechat + weeslack plugin - fully featured, super fast slack from the CLI
  • philsnow 8y ago
    +1 for remind and wyrd. Remind is really, really powerful. You can express things like an appointment that fires "every 3 weeks starting May 4th, but if that day falls on a weekend or holiday then {skip it, move it to the following/preceding weekday that isn't a holiday}", and lots more. Wyrd is a really nice console frontend to remind (I just found that there are graphical frontends available too). Finally with rem2ics you can express really complicated things in Remind and then export the results as an iCalendar-compatible format and import that into whatever other calendar you want. I used screen, remind+wyrd, mutt, and irssi (and even ledger) in school; I got a job at a bigco that pretty much required me to use gmail and gcal, and I stopped using console things as much. Lately I've been toying around with moving my mail flow back into console / console-ish inside emacs. This brings back all kinds of memories: https://www.roaringpenguin.com/wiki/index.php/Remind_use_case_2 https://www.roaringpenguin.com/wiki/index.php/Remind_use_cas...
• dstdk 8y ago
  I was going to say xterm.. But I guess ssh, git, vim, gcc, make, node, tar, docker, elinks, mutt ls, ps, cp, mv, mkdir, timidity, minicom, tmux, diff, jq and some I can't recall right now
• chicocode 8y ago
  fpp http://facebook.github.io/PathPicker/ http://facebook.github.io/PathPicker/
  • DataWorker 8y ago
    Rad
• lchsk 8y ago
  htop and xstarter (disclaimer, I'm the author of the latter)
  • bananicorn 8y ago
    Damn, xstarter looks neat! I'll try how well it plays with the suckless terminal :)
    • lchsk 8y ago
      Thanks! I think it works well with st!
• kamranahmed_se 8y ago
  Some of them that I can't live without are - git-standup http://github.com/kamranahmedse/git-standup - z https://github.com/rupa/z - ZSH https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh Apart from that, some that I use time to time - curl-size https://github.com/egoist/curl-size - ripgrep https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep - jq https://github.com/stedolan/jq - asciinema https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema
  • peterwwillis 8y ago
    git-standup seems cool, but misses the one thing I would want from it: show me the commits I've made from each repo that I work in, sorted by time. That way I can see that I made commit 1 in repo X, then commit 2 in repo Y, then commit 3 in repo X. Also instead of "-d 4" to see 4 days ago, "January 15th" or "Thursday" would be handy.
    • kamranahmed_se 8y ago
      > show me the commits I've made from each repo that I work in, sorted by time It does show the commits from each repo sorted by time. Repositories are not sorted though, if that is what you are asking for.
      • peterwwillis 8y ago
        Yeah, I'm only interested in the actual flow of all my work, not the flow of my work in individual repos. I can use 'git log' to list my work in a single repo.
  • roddds 8y ago
    Just notice that you linked to Oh My Zsh (which, granted, is essential) but not to ZSH (http://www.zsh.org/ http://www.zsh.org/)
    • meowface 8y ago
      >(which, granted, is essential) Unless you belong to the Prezto or Antigen sects. :)
• pedrorijo91 8y ago
  https://github.com/wting/autojump https://github.com/wting/autojump
• nextos 8y ago
  emacs screen notmuch, isync powertop parallel, ag
• jimjimjim 8y ago
  - emacs - mc - git - ssh
• yread 8y ago
  cd because I never had to lookup how to use it EDIT: hm it doesn't even have a man/info page. Where can you learn about "cd" or "cd -", then?!
  • kamranahmed_se 8y ago
    `cd` is not a command; it is built into your shell. Some systems, like OS X and CentOS, map the cd man page to builtin which lists all the shell builtins and lets you know you should look at your shell's man page.
  • ronsor 8y ago
    man sh
  • yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
    In bash at least, run `help cd`
  • cup-of-tea 8y ago
    Try `type cd` and you will see it is a shell builtin. In bash at least you can see the help via `help cd`. See 1.4.1.7 here for how bash searches for commands: http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/sect_01_04.html#sect_01_04_01_07 http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/sect_01_04...
  • ciupicri 8y ago
    cd has at least two man pages on Fedora 27: BASH_BUILTINS(1) and CD(1P) from POSIX Programmer's Manual.
  • kps 8y ago
    > hm it doesn't even have a man/info page. It does on Unix and BSD systems.
• sneak 8y ago
  pom
• boyter 8y ago
  Tmux and ripgrep are two that I use daily. I used to use cloc then switched to tokei, then to my own scc which I use frequently along with lc. Hyperfine is something I have been using a lot and despite having ripgrep I still use grep often with xargs.
• sneak 8y ago
  byobu
• cyberjunkie 8y ago
  tmux https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki glances https://nicolargo.github.io/glances/ https://nicolargo.github.io/glances/ rtv https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv rainbowstream https://github.com/orakaro/rainbowstream https://github.com/orakaro/rainbowstream discurses https://github.com/topisani/Discurses https://github.com/topisani/Discurses telegram-cli https://github.com/vysheng/tg https://github.com/vysheng/tg
• Dowwie 8y ago
  Written in Rust: - fd: A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to 'find' https://github.com/sharkdp/fd - ripgrep: ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep - exa: Replacement for 'ls' written in Rust https://github.com/ogham/exa - bat: A 'cat' replacement. I recommend following the customizations. https://github.com/sharkdp/bat Written in Python: - asciinema: Terminal session recorder https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema - httpie: Modern command line HTTP client https://github.com/jakubroztocil/httpie - visidata: A terminal spreadsheet multitool for discovering and arranging data https://github.com/saulpw/visidata - youtube-dl: Command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and other video sites https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl - pgcli: Postgres cli with autocomplete and syntax highlighting https://github.com/dbcli/pgcli Written in C - jq: Command-line JSON processor https://github.com/stedolan/jq - tmux: a terminal multiplexer https://github.com/tmux/tmux - pspg: postgres pager (you can combine it with pgcli) https://github.com/okbob/pspg
  • kaushalmodi 8y ago
    As you are using tmux, also check out the awesome tmuxp written in Python. The author is very thorough with the package; testing and documentation. Tmuxp allows you to quickly launch pre-configured tmux sessions.
    • Dowwie 8y ago
      Thanks for the tip. I briefly read through the docs and it's not clear what this offers above and beyond what tmux does?
      • cevn 8y ago
        I think the idea is to be able to use tmux in different layouts, configured by simple plaintext. I'll try it out.
      • kaushalmodi 8y ago
        The benefit of tmuxp is pretty clear from its README[1]. It gives this example: session_name: 4-pane-split windows: - window_name: dev window layout: tiled shell_command_before: - cd ~/ # run as a first command in all panes panes: - shell_command: # pane no. 1 - cd /var/log # run multiple commands in this pane - ls -al | grep \.log - echo second pane # pane no. 2 - echo third pane # pane no. 3 - echo forth pane # pane no. 4 The example is very simple (I use tmuxp to heavily configure the session initialization), but it shows how you can have a config file to set a session's name, set the number and names of windows in there, set the layout of panes differently if you want in each window, run commands like "cd", set env vars differently if you want, in each pane. You can find a lot more examples of tmuxp config on its doc site[2]. tmux doesn't allow one to have such quick, easy-to-read config files. You can of course do most of this in your .tmux.conf, but it will be too complicated to allow reuse and quick modifications. [1]: https://github.com/tmux-python/tmuxp#load-a-tmux-session https://github.com/tmux-python/tmuxp#load-a-tmux-session [2]: https://tmuxp.git-pull.com/en/latest/examples.html https://tmuxp.git-pull.com/en/latest/examples.html
• MikkoFinell 8y ago
  history | awk '{CMD[$2]++;count++;}END { for (a in CMD)print CMD[a] " " CMD[a]/count*100 "% " a;}' | grep -v "./" | column -c3 -s " " -t | sort -nr | nl | head -n10 1 167 16.7% git 2 130 13% ll 3 94 9.4% clear 4 90 9% make 5 80 8% cd 6 57 5.7% e 7 52 5.2% cat 8 45 4.5% man 9 38 3.8% valgrind 10 37 3.7% rm Where ´e´ is an alias for ´vim´.
  • falcolas 8y ago
    Guessing 'll' is an alias for 'ls -al' or similar as well?
    • dicknuckle 8y ago
      It's a common alias in Ubuntu systems I believe.
      • falcolas 8y ago
        I'm just doing a confirmation, since I personally completely overwrite the .bashrc with my own, eliminating any default aliases.
  • wyclif 8y ago
    My output from the same: 1 93 18.6% l 2 75 15% exit 3 60 12% zsh 4 53 10.6% cd 5 47 9.4% nvim 6 20 4% ssh 7 14 2.8% lt 8 14 2.8% ls 9 14 2.8% la 10 10 2% sudo
  • isostatic 8y ago
    Clear? I always press ctrl-l
    • MikkoFinell 8y ago
      Me too. But when programming I usually run clear && make all && ./a.out
• jsmeaton 8y ago
  CSVkit - http://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/1.0.3/ http://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/1.0.3/ A collection of tools for slicing and dicing csv files on the command line.
• ninguem2 8y ago
  pdftk. If you find yourself needing to extract pages, split or merge pdf documents, this is wonderful.
  • coolutils 8y ago
    Split PDF files by pages, blank pages, file size, bar codes, bookmarks. https://www.coolutils.com/download/PDFSplitter.exe https://www.coolutils.com/download/PDFSplitter.exe
• TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Emacs. Just ensure you're running a 256-bit color terminal emulator, and for most uses it doesn't even differ that much from the GUI version. Recently I've been doing a lot of work by SSH-ing to my desktop machine from a small netbook and using the terminal Emacs client. If you run Emacs in server mode, the transition is so smooth that at this point, I don't bother getting out of bed if I need to work on something late in the evening, I just take the netbook and SSH over.
  • gkya 8y ago
    If you don't have a reason to use Emacs from the terminal emulator, use the GUI. And for SSH, it's very hard to reject Tramp. One must is to make it less verbose though: (setq tramp-verbose 1). Then it becomes faster (at least in my perception) and way less noisy.
    • TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Maybe I didn't word myself clearly enough - my reason for using Emacs from the terminal emulator is working from a small, portable machine on the go, and pick up stuff where I left it. It so happens that my travel machine is a Windows tablet/netbook, and Emacs has some performance quirks there. SSH-ing to a beefy desktop machine (that also runs an instance of the product I'm working on) saves me from fiddling with Tramp, and lets me almost seamlessly switch between travel mode and working on the desktop.
    • philsnow 8y ago
      I find using emacs in the terminal less bothersome on osx because of osx's inane out of the box window management; I can replace it completely with managing emacs frames in screen and that experience doesn't change when I move between platforms.
  • gjstein 8y ago
    Agreed. I also like to use TRAMP [1] for remote editing files in Emacs: it gets a local copy of a file you're editing so that it only requires a connection when you save/load (as opposed to constantly streaming Emacs over SSH). Not suitable for all tasks, but it means I'm rarely at the mercy of my lackluster internet connection. [1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode
• vowelless 8y ago
  Some less mentioned ones : tig, htop
  • purerandomness 8y ago
    tig is the best underrated git frontend out there.
• padthai 8y ago
  z and autojump are great, but if you want a full fledged file manager you should try ranger: https://ranger.github.io/ https://ranger.github.io/ For news, newsboat is quite nice: https://newsboat.org/ https://newsboat.org/ For parsing and select actions over url links you can use urlview (it works perfectly with pdftotext, newsboat, mutt, vim, w3m, etc.): https://github.com/sigpipe/urlview https://github.com/sigpipe/urlview You can download webpages with httrack: http://www.httrack.com/ http://www.httrack.com/ rsync is a fundamental tool to move files between computers or do backups, forget about scp: https://rsync.samba.org/ https://rsync.samba.org/ You can work with most pdf and ps (those that are not scanned images) using your usual text tools, http://www.xpdfreader.com/ http://www.xpdfreader.com/ There are even ready to go pdf + grep commands: https://pdfgrep.org/ https://pdfgrep.org/ Somewhat meta, when you live in the terminal you need to be sure that you are a bit POSIX compliant. shellcheck is a good tool for that: https://www.shellcheck.net/ https://www.shellcheck.net/ Finally, there are a two packages that should be in any distributions (include commands like vidir, parallel, watch, etc.): https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/ https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/ https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/ https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/
• jeroenjanssens 8y ago
  mdp - A command-line based markdown presentation tool - https://github.com/visit1985/mdp https://github.com/visit1985/mdp
• NVRM 8y ago
  micro, mc, ag silver searcher, stat, find, aria2c, xev, w3m, wmctrl, nohup, xdotool, docker, php, ffmpeg, phantomjs, du, ls [From my history file, all others are homemade scripts and little functions in .bashrc]
  • v_lisivka 8y ago
    ncdu is much better than just du.
    • NVRM 8y ago
      Thanks. Will try it in details. Currently, it is taking like really forever to scan my bunchs of old school hard drives! du options are easy to remember, ergonomy first^ May I suggest a good one to remember `ls -ltrapR` <- It always kill anyone aside ;)
      • NVRM 8y ago
        And it was an amazing jump in productivity when i forced myself to learn `stat` shortcuts. Recommended!
    • detuur 8y ago
      Genuinely the only way I use du is like this: du -sh * which shows total disk usage for every file and folder in the current directory. I've actually aliased it as `dush` because I use it so often. Bonus tip: if you're using btrfs, it has a built-in du that keeps track of cow statistics, so you can see which files/folders are deduped and which aren't. It's invoked with btrfs filesystem du -s * or (because the btrfs binary understands abbreviations) btrfs fi du -s *
• veganjay 8y ago
  First of all, you might want to check out the subreddit: /r/commandline https://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/ https://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/ general commands - awk/grep/sed/wc - text file processing - convert (image magick) - image processing tool - cpulimit - limit the cpu usage of a process - fdupes - check for duplicate files and optionally remove them - pdftk - concatenate pdf files and more - https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ - rsync - back up tool - tmux - terminal multiplexer - almost always my first install - tree - view directory contents in a tree format - zcat/zmore - display a file that is compressed (e.g. zmore /var/log/syslog.2.gz) security/reverse engineering: - binwalk - search binary images for embedded files - gdb + peda - debugger with extensions - https://github.com/longld/peda https://github.com/longld/peda - nmap - network scanning tool - radare2 - command line dissassembler - https://github.com/radare/radare2 https://github.com/radare/radare2 - scapy - network packet crafting - https://github.com/secdev/scapy https://github.com/secdev/scapy - tshark - network traffic analyzer - tcpdump - network traffic analyzer - xxd - hexdump tool Bonus: - find - find files - I often use this to find files containing a string: $ cat bin/findstring #!/bin/sh find . -type f -exec grep -i -l "$@" {} \;
  • laumars 8y ago
    If you're just using find to run grep against all files then you would be better off using the recursive flag in grep instead
    • kjeetgill 8y ago
      I like the composition of tools, it lets you extend your usage pretty easily. I personally run this 20 times a day: find -name '*.java' | xargs grep 'pattern'
      • laumars 8y ago
        But at least there you're searching for specific files. I was talking only about running a find to launch an instance of grep for every file found. That's more keystrokes to get a slower result. For what it's worth, my biggest usage of find is similar to your java example (except a different file extension). I also do do '-exec sed...') a lot too.
• carc1n0gen 8y ago
  rainbowstream A python cli tool for twitter
• Froyoh 8y ago
  That is all.
• timundo 8y ago
  wuzz: https://github.com/asciimoo/wuzz https://github.com/asciimoo/wuzz
• kaushalmodi 8y ago
  Emacs, tmux, tmuxp, ripgrep, eless[1], ncdu, exa (ls replacement. I often use 'exa --tree'), sed, awk, peco (I use this in aliases to select one or more items from a command outputting multiple values), hugo, dtrx, textract (npm), wget, shellcheck, rsync, htop. I heavily use git, but via Magit in Emacs. [1]: My own little utility to use bare bones Emacs as less/pager: https://eless.scripter.co https://eless.scripter.co
  • h1d 8y ago
    Wow, peco is so convenient, now I don't have to keep trying to grep every possibilities.
• falcolas 8y ago
  A few I don't see otherwise listed: export MARKPATH=$HOME/.marks function jump { cd -P $MARKPATH/$1 2> /dev/null || (echo "No such mark: $1" && marks) } function mark { mkdir -p $MARKPATH; ln -s $(pwd) $MARKPATH/$1 } function unmark { rm -i $MARKPATH/$1 } function marks { ls -l $MARKPATH | sed 's/ / /g' | cut -d' ' -f9- && echo } _jump() { local cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]} COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "$( ls $MARKPATH )" -- $cur) ) } complete -F _jump jump I used to use this one more; converted to vimwiki instead: http://todotxt.org/ http://todotxt.org/ Local documentation: wget --recursive --level=5 --convert-links --page-requisites --wait=1 --random-wait --timestamping --no-parent $1 The only other ones which top the charts are jq, aws, curl, and docker.
• jamestomasino 8y ago
  There's so many programs and scripts I use it's hard to keep them all straight. So, instead of trying I just exported a list of every command in my history that I've used at least twice: https://gist.github.com/jamestomasino/9d912b409e5b6067ac233e62e1765c96 https://gist.github.com/jamestomasino/9d912b409e5b6067ac233e... Also of interest, my custom functions: https://github.com/jamestomasino/dotfiles/tree/master/bash/.functions https://github.com/jamestomasino/dotfiles/tree/master/bash/.... And finally, my OSX & Linux Mint install scripts which include a lot of great app packages: https://github.com/jamestomasino/dotfiles/blob/master/osxsetup.sh https://github.com/jamestomasino/dotfiles/blob/master/osxset... https://github.com/jamestomasino/dotfiles/blob/master/mintsetup.sh https://github.com/jamestomasino/dotfiles/blob/master/mintse...
• jweir 8y ago
  https://github.com/junegunn/fzf https://github.com/junegunn/fzf Fuzzy Finder for files, history and more. Integrates with Vim (and maybe other editors). It is wicked fast.
  • mping 8y ago
    And if you use the bash/zsh functions the provide in the wiki, it becomes even more useful for git, file opening, etc
• roadbeats 8y ago
  ranger mocp rofi feh urxvt
  • silasb 8y ago
    ranger looks awesome... Going to try to integrate that into my workflow. Thanks.
• bgongfu 8y ago
  Tetris: https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cixl/blob/master/examples/cixtris.cx https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cixl/blob/master/examples/ci... PNG viewer: https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cximage/blob/master/examples/pngans.cx https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cximage/blob/master/examples... Linux/64 binaries may be found here: https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cxbin/blob/master/linux64 https://github.com/basic-gongfu/cxbin/blob/master/linux64
• poops 8y ago
  Since iTunes has been getting buggier and buggier for me (and I'm trying to switch to programs that run on all platforms), I've replaced with... beets http://beets.io/ http://beets.io/ for library management mpd https://www.musicpd.org/ https://www.musicpd.org/ for serving music & ncmpcpp https://rybczak.net/ncmpcpp/ https://rybczak.net/ncmpcpp/ for playing music (which I alias to `music`)
  • LeoPanthera 8y ago
    Combine with "abcde" for ripping CDs.
• turkeybacongod 8y ago
  like... tmux?
• lowry 8y ago
  st
• upofadown 8y ago
  Ever since I learned that USENET was still a thing for a current area of interest: slrn http://slrn.sourceforge.net/ http://slrn.sourceforge.net/ for reading newsgroups My old fave (which I didn't even remember the name of) was nn http://www.nndev.org/ http://www.nndev.org/ ... which had too steep a (re)learning curve for reading just the one newsgroup.
  • EamonnMR 8y ago
    Out of curiosity, where'd you sign up?
    • upofadown 8y ago
      http://www.eternal-september.org/ http://www.eternal-september.org/
• vram22 8y ago
  Linux has hundreds of them, in the various bin directories. Many are interesting. This shell snippet lists all the directories in $PATH, using less, so you can page through them: for dir in `echo $PATH | sed 's/:/ /g'` do echo Listing dir: $dir ls -l $dir | nl done | less I came across the watch command recently, which seems useful, and wrote something like it in Python: A Python version of the Linux watch command: https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2018/05/a-python-version-of-linux-watch-command.html https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2018/05/a-python-version-of-linux... I've also been writing Python versions of some other Linux commands, and will post about them here some time later. Also, for saving (and then viewing) man pages (about commands or other topics), without the formatting characters (such as ^H), on some Linux distros, I find this useful: m, a Unix shell utility to save cleaned-up man pages as text: https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2017/03/m-unix-shell-utility-to-save-cleaned-up.html https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2017/03/m-unix-shell-utility-to-s...
  • laumars 8y ago
    > Also, for saving (and then viewing) man pages (about commands or other topics), without the formatting characters (such as ^H), on some Linux distros, I find this useful: ^H is one of the two backspace characters (the other being ^?) depending on which VT standard you're configured to use. So you shouldn't really need a dedicate script to do that as it's just a problem between your pseudo-TTY (Linux console) and your terminal emulator (PuTTY / iTerm / xterm / etc). Thankfully both are easily configurable. However without knowing which terminal emulator you're using I couldn't walk you throw configuring that. In terms of the TTY; you can change the backspace character via the `stty` command: stty erase [hit backspace on your keyboard] Another thought is it might be a case that the TTY is largely configured correctly already but you're overwriting your environmental variables with non-standard values (eg the $TERM var with a value that differs from the actual terminal you're using) which is causing the pager (`less` / `more` etc. `man` will use this for the paging) to break the standard your terminal is expecting. But either way, this is definitely a configuration problem rather than something that should be fixed with additional parsing scripts.
    • vram22 8y ago
• dwwmmn 8y ago
  Since a couple people mentioned z and autojump: I recently discovered z and found it so useful I ported it to Windows/Powershell. https://github.com/dwwmmn/z.ps1 https://github.com/dwwmmn/z.ps1 It's a little simplistic for now but I hope it helps someone.
• bovermyer 8y ago
  `makearms`, a random SVG heraldry generator. I'm biased, though, because I'm the author. https://github.com/ironarachne/heraldry https://github.com/ironarachne/heraldry
• ktilcu 8y ago
  I love tig https://github.com/jonas/tig https://github.com/jonas/tig
• mgliwka 8y ago
  Meanwhile on twitter: https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/993165679833567233 https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/993165679833567233
• gkya 8y ago
  If by terminal programs you mean command-line interface (CLI) programs, then you'll never regret learning how core Unix commands work, in themselves and in pipelines, and their POSIX-defined interfaces. I use these often: make grep find sed xargs m4 cut tr cat tee sort uniq head tail pg/more/less ps pkill/pgrep. My favourite among them is make, once you learn how it's meant to be used, it's an incredibly useful and flexible tool. Some other useful CLI programs that I use and are not part of POSIX are: strace, perl, webalizer, rcs. RCS might be a mostly-forgotten VCS tool, but it is very suitable for version-controlling projects that consist of single files. I mostly use it for plain-text or Org-mode documents. If you meant terminal-UI (TUI) programs, like top/htop, vi, etc., I don't really use them. But I've used these in the past: - mutt: a very nice mail client - newsbeuter: RSS/ATOM feeds client - vi: I do occasionally use vi in some situations In the past years I've started to use Emacs tools instead of these because Emacs is a very rewarding, composable and comfortable working environment. Still, I use CLI programs through Bash/shell-mode all the time, because it's the most efficient way to do many tasks.
• hypertexthero 8y ago
  The Fuck - https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck
• alifbae 8y ago
  youtube-dl
  • dredmorbius 8y ago
    Add to your repertoire: mpsyt.
• ufmace 8y ago
  I basically live in vim and tmux when I'm doing development work. Tmux IMO basically turns a terminal from a handy utility to a fully productive workspace. I switched to ripgrep for my grepping needs, I find it fast and the syntax and output coloring handy. Just found fastmod recently, https://github.com/facebookincubator/fastmod https://github.com/facebookincubator/fastmod. Very handy for doing bulk substitutions of strings in project directories - it can prompt with a diff for every change and do full regexes, so you can try out tricky things and make sure it isn't doing anything crazy before you let it make 500 changes throughout your repo. Also a fan of gitsh, https://github.com/thoughtbot/gitsh https://github.com/thoughtbot/gitsh. Helps out with using Git on the command line just the right amount IMO - just avoiding the git prefix, tab completion, and a little syntax highlighting, instead of trying to redo the whole interface. I don't use it that much, but jq, https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ is really handy for slicing and dicing json data without diving into the complexity of writing actual programs. And on OS X, homebrew is indispensable for actually managing all of your CLI programs. I also have found this Google Drive cli handy, https://github.com/odeke-em/drive https://github.com/odeke-em/drive. If you want to sync some but not all of your Google Drive files, and only push and pull on command instead of continuously, it's great.
• shiado 8y ago
  nettop
• tfe 8y ago
  pianobar - command line Pandora client http://6xq.net/pianobar/ http://6xq.net/pianobar/ https://github.com/PromyLOPh/pianobar https://github.com/PromyLOPh/pianobar
• edgarvaldes 8y ago
  It is no longer updated, but I recommend https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/ https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/ as a very good read. From the about page: >This blog is intended as a quick look at terminal-based applications available in Linux, and in some similar operating systems. Not only are these ideal for modern, low-power and space-saving computers, but they go a long way toward invigorating out-of-date hardware.
• BeetleB 8y ago
  - Midnight commander - Best file manager ever - htop - a graphical top - xonsh: A shell written in Python. You can now write your shell scripts in Python (with access to any Python library) - mplayer: Video player
• 0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago
  - ncdu for disk usage and deleting extra stuff
• jlgaddis 8y ago
  lastpass-cli ("LastPass command line interface tool") [0], with several aliases: $ alias | grep lpass lp=lpass lpls='lpass ls' lppw='lpass show -c -G --password' lpsh='lpass show -G' lpst='lpass status' [0]: https://github.com/lastpass/lastpass-cli https://github.com/lastpass/lastpass-cli
• foobarchu 8y ago
  I find myself using noti a lot. It's effectively just a message generator that can receive data over stdout or trigger manually. It uses whatever the most appropriate notification method for your system is, so it feels very seemless. I use it for long-running tasks where I don't really know how long it's going to take. https://github.com/variadico/noti https://github.com/variadico/noti
• fusiongyro 8y ago
  The pipe viewer pv: https://ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml https://ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml Great way to give you a progress bar on a long-running process from the command line. entr is useful for doing stuff on file change: http://www.entrproject.org/ http://www.entrproject.org/ GNU parallel is like xargs, but in parallel: https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/ https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/
• Dewep 8y ago
  GCE (Global Commands Execution), which is a desktop application that provides a single context to manage and run multiple scripts. https://github.com/Dewep/GCE https://github.com/Dewep/GCE Why? As web applications are being split in micro services and independant entities, it becomes harder and harder to setup a local dev environment and you have to handle dozen of shell terminals. GCE aims to take that pain away by offering you the ability to configure the setup of your projects once and run it in the blink of an eye.
• maxdata 8y ago
  Piggybacking on OP's suggestion of youtube-dl, i have this alias for quickly grabbing the audio-only version of a youtube video. (I use it when I come across a song on youtube that I can't find for sale or streaming anywhere else) alias dl-audio='youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3' If you have ffmpeg installed, just drop the video ID after dl-audio, and you'll get an mp3 of the highest quality audio stream available for the video.
  • e12e 8y ago
    I wouldn't specify mp3, unless you need to support legacy/device playback - there are often better audio versions available (ogg, aac etc).
• vram22 8y ago
  The Decorate-Sort-Undecorate idiom (a.k.a Schwartzian Transform) is useful: https://www.google.co.in/search?q=decorate+sort+undecorate+idiom+in+unix+command+line https://www.google.co.in/search?q=decorate+sort+undecorate+i...
• billconan 8y ago
  I like ffmpeg
• dredmorbius 8y ago
  A/V: mplayer, aa-xine, surfraw, mpsyt, youtube-dl, cdparanoia, oggenc Network mgt: ipcalc, mtr, wireshark, nc Comms & Info: mutt, w3m, irssi, screen (though if you're just starting: tmux), swaks (smtp swiss army knife), Code & Tasks: make, gawk, sponge (moreutils generally), xclip (pbcopy OSX), at, batch, and cron, Calculators: units (GNU, not BSD), bc, & dc, Editing & Docs: pandoc, vim, less ("&" filters!), Files: curl, wget, scp, rsync, & lftp, mc, column, tree, Images: mogrify / convert (ImageMagick), Sysadmin: apt, grep-dpkg, apt-file, auto-apt, pstree,
• urmish 8y ago
  I just started using cmus and it works great. Also loads up the music library pretty fast. tmux, neovim are great together (after some configuration.) Mplayer seems better than mpv. They need configuration though. htop/top are pretty useful for figuring out which applications are taking up cpu resources. cpufreq-utils are useful to set max/min cpu speeds if you're running low on laptop battery. meld is an amazing diff tool though not command line. vimdiff is useful too.
• sevensor 8y ago
  Since all the good suggestions are taken, I want to mention a couple of diversions: fortune: prints something silly or thought-provoking. You can get extra fortune cookie files or add your own. cowsay: prints an ascii-art cow (or other creature) with a speech-bubble filled with the text of your choice. You can pipe fortune into cowsay for extra fun. $ fortune | cowsay ______________________________________ / Publishing a volume of verse is like \ | dropping a rose petal down the Grand | \ Canyon and waiting for the echo. / -------------------------------------- \ ^__^ \ (oo)\_______ (__)\ )\/\ ||----w | || ||
  • e12e 8y ago
    These days, there's also: https://github.com/erkin/ponysay https://github.com/erkin/ponysay My latest find is to use a combination of weechat and wee-slack for most of my slack usage (it's note quite there when it comes to editing, or in-line reactions). But works well for the chat part: https://weechat.org/ https://weechat.org/ https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack As a former BitchX and sometime irssi user, weechat feel cozy. And it doesn't eat all your ram just for chat.
• kenrose 8y ago
  q Parse CSV with SQL
• btschaegg 8y ago
  For me personally, I guess netcat, socat, tcpdump and SSH (for tunneling) qualify the most. I'm working in a Windows environment where I'm usually not allowed to install new software, and I miss those by far the most. Often, I need to do a test run of something which involves slightly rerouting network traffic and I'll spend half a day hacking together some horrible "solution" that I could literally have done in 3 lines of bash code on a UNIX-like system. Maybe throw hexdump for looking at binary stuff in there too. Edit: Oh, and of course GDB! If only I could have the accumulated days of log forensics back that were done just because it's still faster to do that instead of getting the visual studio debugger to work remotely. Whatever happened to KISS? -_-
• cmcginty 8y ago
  sponge is great when you want to read and write to the same file: cat file.txt | grep -v secret | sponge file.txt
• hyperpallium 8y ago
  REQUEST: jq is great for json - but is there a "jq for xml"? Some webservices are still only available in xml (e.g. uv levels). I currently use XMLStarlet for xml in the terminal. There are extra annoyances in xml that you can't avoid (like namespaces), but it could be a lot closer to jq.
  • eigengrau 8y ago
    I’ve used https://github.com/ericchiang/xpup https://github.com/ericchiang/xpup for this a few times.
    • hyperpallium 8y ago
      Thanks, seems the right idea, but browsing the code, decode just interprets a single xpath expression. While that is useful (and I've used xpath from the CL like before), I found I quickly needed to be able to chain them together etc. pup (https://github.com/ericchiang/pup/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/ericchiang/pup/blob/master/README.md) which apparently inspired xpup does seem to have this, e.g. chaining, but unfortunately it uses css selectors instead of xpath.
  • everybodyknows 8y ago
    xml2 -- for simple tasks.
• O_H_E 8y ago
  xrandr: Manege external monitors zsh: Stepping up your terminal game - https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh tmux: A terminal multiplexer, aka turns your terminal to a minimalist workspace (the only sane way I found to copy terminal output without using a mouse) howdoi: Search stachoverflow/stackexchange from the CLI - https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi/ https://github.com/gleitz/howdoi/ nmtui: WIFI/Networking from the terminal - https://github.com/heftig/NetworkManager https://github.com/heftig/NetworkManager bluetoothctl: Bluetooth from the terminal ___________________ Lists for exploration: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unix_commands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unix_commands - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/List_of_applications https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/List_of_applications - https://github.com/alebcay/awesome-shell https://github.com/alebcay/awesome-shell - https://github.com/agarrharr/awesome-cli-apps https://github.com/agarrharr/awesome-cli-apps - https://github.com/herrbischoff/awesome-command-line-apps https://github.com/herrbischoff/awesome-command-line-apps (The github links seems similar, but there are some differences indeed)
  • O_H_E 8y ago
    Apperanlty I can't make a list of urls on HN, WTF
• e12e 8y ago
  For Windows, I'd like to point to http://scoop.sh http://scoop.sh as mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17019197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17019197 It's a bit like a mix of (x)stow and apt for Windows. Or the good parts of arch aur with binary distribution. Should probably also mention that I'm experimenting with asdf as a version manager - to avoid a long list of setup in bashrc to adjust paths to various interpreters. It follows a lot of best practices that various dedicated version managers seem to pick up eventually: https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf
• everybodyknows 8y ago
  locate may be the most-overlooked timesaver on the GNU distro. For searches of more than ~50000 directories, it's an order of magnitude faster than find: $ time locate -0 /{opt,usr}/\*.gitignore | xargs -0 stat --format=%s | wc 387 387 1225 real 0m0.087s $ time find /{opt,usr} -name '.gitignore' -print0 2>/dev/null | xargs -0 stat --format=%s | wc 387 387 1225 real 0m0.748s The speedup comes from reading a single database file rather than every directory within the tree to be searched. If the files you want were last touched today, a manually triggered rebuild of the database may be needed: $ sudo updatedb The argument syntax for path specification of locate I find more convenient as well.
• apjana 8y ago
  - googler: Google from the terminal - Buku: Bookmark manager like a text-based mini-web - nnn: The missing terminal file browser for X - bcal: Storage expression calculator - imgp: Multi-core batch image resizer and rotator - keysniffer: Linux kernel mode debugfs keylogger - ddgr: DuckDuckGo from the terminal - pdd: Tiny date, time diff calculator
• pvaldes 8y ago
  Some time ago I wrote just for fun this couple of lines: > What else I'm missing out on echo 'Currently there are ' $(ver=(/bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin) && ls ${ver[*]} | wc -l) 'commands installed and available in the system' This prints the man page of 3 random commands. One by one. Is a way to discover a few new commands each day. To go to the next command and exit press q. I hope you enjoy it. commandoftheday=(/bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin) && ls ${commandoftheday} |sort -R |head -3 |xargs man '{}'
• crasch4 8y ago
  * exiftool - photo metadata editing tool * dcraw - RAW photo processing tool * imagemagick - image processing library * pandoc - convert one file into another * diceware - random word generator (useful for creating passwords) * csvtomd - convert csv files to markdown tables * newsbeuter - RSS reader * zathura - pdf viewer * weechat - irc client * ncdu - interactive disk usage * ranger - file manager * mpd - music player daemon * vimpc - vim inspired client for mpd
• dingleberry 8y ago
  vifm
• ablx_ 8y ago
  tldr (https://github.com/tldr-pages https://github.com/tldr-pages) since I always forget the damn parameters for tar & it's more convinient than man
• simon_acca 8y ago
  gron, a simple tool to make JSON greppable: https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron
• kup0 8y ago
  musikcube: a cross-platform, terminal-based music player https://github.com/clangen/musikcube https://github.com/clangen/musikcube
• Fazel94 8y ago
  I can't live without `sudo` :p - `ffmpeg` one utility for video manipulation to rule them all. - `ping` to check whether I am connected to the internet or not. - `curl -vvv maktabkhooneh.org` to check where is the connection problem happens. - `howdoi` search StackOverflow for snippets to solve your problem from the command line.
• templon 8y ago
  Didn't see anybody mention "miller" yet ... pipe/grep/cut/awk etc for CSV files, really rocks.
• skfist 8y ago
  Written in Python: - subliminal: Find & Download subtitles https://github.com/Diaoul/subliminal https://github.com/Diaoul/subliminal