5 ms·

htop, tmux/screen, xargs, vim/emacs, rsync, rtorrent, ack are far common to everyone I know (direct and indirectly) that uses the command line.

• elehack 15y ago
  Yep, lots of them are known to some subset of people. However, if people find one or two really useful ones that they didn't know about previously, the list has done its job. For me, the major winner was dstat. Did not know about that tool - I've been struggling with the output of iostat. I'll also be experimenting with tmux as a screen replacement/alternative.
  • pdovy 15y ago
    Yeah, most of these weren't anything new, but I hadn't heard about ack. Very useful.
• hubb 15y ago
  sudo apt-get install ack got me: ack - Kanji code converter :(
  • kevindication 15y ago
    On debian (and derivatives) the package is called "ack-grep"
    • selectnull 15y ago
      I always install it by downloading standalone version from http://betterthangrep.com/ http://betterthangrep.com/ There is a command on the homepage you can copy paste to shell and execute. Ack is simply too often used and I don't want to type ack-grep all the time.
      • pyre 15y ago
        "man alias" ?
        • sixtofour 15y ago
          <nit> $ man alias No manual entry for alias $ man bash ALIASES Aliases allow a string to be substituted for a word when it is used as the first word of a simple command. </nit> alias is not a standalone, it's part of the shell (in bash at least).
          • pyre 15y ago
            Sometimes there are aliases for bash built-ins that will take you to the manpage. For me, 'man alias' brings up: BASH_BUILTINS(1) Though, I'm using zsh which may be layering something in there.
          • jewel 15y ago
            Try "help alias"
        • selectnull 15y ago
          Alias (though not 'man alias' :) ) could work. But I prefer my way (on server) because I have one thing less to worry about, namely putting 'alias ack=ack-grep' to .bash_aliases. Yeah, it's quick and dirty I guess...
      • __david__ 15y ago
        sudo dpkg-divert --local --divert /usr/bin/ack --rename --add /usr/bin/ack-grep That way you still get the benefits of the packaging system and you don't have to alias or create a /usr/local/bin symlink.
  • deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
• getsat 15y ago
  +1 for tmux. It's an amazing improvement to screen.
  • spudlyo 15y ago
    How so? As far as I can tell, the only benefit it has over screen is faster vertically split windows.
    • getsat 15y ago
      Vertical splitting, server/client architecture (shared process), non-crap codebase if you want to dig into it, BSD licensed instead of GPL. I also have no charset/encoding issues with tmux and it doesn't eat my scrollback. I'm sure the latter points can be remedied by config file settings for screen, but it's nice to use software that just works once in a while.
      • spudlyo 15y ago
        Vertical splitting screen has. Software architecture, perceived code quality, and BSD license are not features. I'm glad that there is competition in this space, but you tmux evangelists need to realize that there is a lot of work that needs to be done before tmux is really "an amazing improvement to screen."
        • sigil 15y ago
          > Vertical splitting screen has. Is vertical split in mainline screen now, or do you still have to patch it? I use both tmux and screen but prefer tmux. Here are some (non-ideological) reasons: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945637 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945637
          • spudlyo 15y ago
            The version available via git from savannah.gnu.org has the old vertical split patch plus a number of more recent scrolling performance fixes. Thanks for your list of non-ideological reasons, better notifications sound pretty compelling. I've been meaning to hack growl support into the OSX screen for a while now...