4 ms·

htop has been on my list of applications I must install immediately on every system for at least 14 years now. I am always a bit shocked when I am reminded ab

htop has been on my list of applications I must install immediately on every system for at least 14 years now. I am always a bit shocked when I am reminded about how young of a project it is. I think the only younger tool that I always install is jq.

quijoteuniv 6y ago
Glad to hear this! I always install htop on all Lunux i install! So cool to read about the backstory :) Good job!
petepete 6y ago
There's a few I now prefer over their old counterparts: fd, ag, bat. fd and ag (or rg) just do what I expect them to, I don't need to think about how to use them. Both find and grep's syntax trip me up, even after 20 years of using them.
- michaelcampbell 6y ago
  What's bat do? (I'm on board with you on fd and rg)
  - petepete 6y ago
    bat is essentially a fancier version of cat. It's fully backward compatible but supports syntax highlighting, paging and has git integration. It's written by the same developer as fd https://github.com/sharkdp/bat https://github.com/sharkdp/bat
  - pueblito 6y ago
    Bat is a cat replacement with syntax highlighting, formatting options; it works great with fd. What's rg?
    - j-james 6y ago
      ripgrep (the binary name is rg) is a faster grep written in Rust.
      - petepete 6y ago
        For me the interface is the draw rather than speed. I use ag rather than rg, but doing `ag search-term path` is how I'd expect it to work. Plus, automatically ignoring .git and other metadata files out of the box is a time saver.
      - cben 6y ago
        https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/ https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/ explains in detail _how_ it's so fast, and is a great reading on practical performance engineering. The interface is nearly 1:1 with `ag` (and the older `ack`). One notable difference is that ag enables `--smart-case` by default, so it treats an all-lowercase pattern as case-insensitive, while `rg` doesn't, you need an explicit `rg -i`. (or set it in a config file, but I'd rather not learn defaults that won't work out-of-the-box on other machines).
        burntsushi 6y ago
        Note that -i will always enable case insensitivity. The -S flag will enable the same kind of smart case behavior that ag has (and with fewer bugs).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
anderspitman 6y ago
I love jq. Since I just learned this today, I'll mention that python comes with a JSON pretty-printing utility that can be used on the CLI: echo '{"some_json": "value"}' | python -m json.tool
- jasomill 6y ago
  Probably worth mentioning in this context that the pygments[1] module adds syntax coloring, as well, ... | python -m json.tool | python -m pygments -l json or, path permitting, ... | python -m json.tool | pygmentize -l json [1] https://pygments.org https://pygments.org
  - jasomill 6y ago
    Oh, and python -m http.server 12345 serves files in the current directory over HTTP on port 12345. I'll stop now, but I love how Python module developers add these "hidden" command-line features. P.S.: You can — and, at this point in history, probably should — s/python/python3/ in all these examples.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

quijoteuniv 6y ago

Glad to hear this! I always install htop on all Lunux i install! So cool to read about the backstory :) Good job!

petepete 6y ago

There's a few I now prefer over their old counterparts: fd, ag, bat. fd and ag (or rg) just do what I expect them to, I don't need to think about how to use them. Both find and grep's syntax trip me up, even after 20 years of using them.

michaelcampbell 6y ago
What's bat do? (I'm on board with you on fd and rg)
- petepete 6y ago
  bat is essentially a fancier version of cat. It's fully backward compatible but supports syntax highlighting, paging and has git integration. It's written by the same developer as fd https://github.com/sharkdp/bat https://github.com/sharkdp/bat
- pueblito 6y ago
  Bat is a cat replacement with syntax highlighting, formatting options; it works great with fd. What's rg?
  - j-james 6y ago
    ripgrep (the binary name is rg) is a faster grep written in Rust.
    - petepete 6y ago
      For me the interface is the draw rather than speed. I use ag rather than rg, but doing `ag search-term path` is how I'd expect it to work. Plus, automatically ignoring .git and other metadata files out of the box is a time saver.
    - cben 6y ago
      https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/ https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/ explains in detail _how_ it's so fast, and is a great reading on practical performance engineering. The interface is nearly 1:1 with `ag` (and the older `ack`). One notable difference is that ag enables `--smart-case` by default, so it treats an all-lowercase pattern as case-insensitive, while `rg` doesn't, you need an explicit `rg -i`. (or set it in a config file, but I'd rather not learn defaults that won't work out-of-the-box on other machines).
      - burntsushi 6y ago
        Note that -i will always enable case insensitivity. The -S flag will enable the same kind of smart case behavior that ag has (and with fewer bugs).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

anderspitman 6y ago

I love jq. Since I just learned this today, I'll mention that python comes with a JSON pretty-printing utility that can be used on the CLI: echo '{"some_json": "value"}' | python -m json.tool

jasomill 6y ago
Probably worth mentioning in this context that the pygments[1] module adds syntax coloring, as well, ... | python -m json.tool | python -m pygments -l json or, path permitting, ... | python -m json.tool | pygmentize -l json [1] https://pygments.org https://pygments.org
- jasomill 6y ago
  Oh, and python -m http.server 12345 serves files in the current directory over HTTP on port 12345. I'll stop now, but I love how Python module developers add these "hidden" command-line features. P.S.: You can — and, at this point in history, probably should — s/python/python3/ in all these examples.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]