18 ms·

The Command-Line Office

131 points by marcuskaz 13y ago

matt__rose 13y ago
This is actually a list of obscure (20 years of Linux use here, and I haven't heard of most of them) command-line utilities. Definitely going to explore calcurse
- jamessb 13y ago
  I'd consider aspell and remind to be well known linux tools. Pandoc is more modern, but probably the most widely used markup conversion tool. Gnuplot and matplotlib are both very popular for graphing.
aidos 13y ago
I was totally unaware of sc. My spreadsheeting life just got immeasurably better.
- username42 13y ago
  it was very famous 20 years ago when X configuration required complex frequency calculus.
  - aidenn0 13y ago
    Fun fact: The first time I tried ubuntu, in order to get my monitor working at its highest resolution I had to add a modeline to my xorg.conf I had been previously using gentoo, where I selected the resolution from a gui. The difference was seems to be ubuntu adopting nouveau a bit earlier than they should have.
zx2c4 13y ago
The author of this article uses pass [1] for password management. I'm the author of pass, if anyone here has any questions. [1] http://www.zx2c4.com/projects/password-store/ http://www.zx2c4.com/projects/password-store/
- marcuskaz 13y ago
  great tool, thanks!
- illbert 13y ago
  Just added it to my cli toolbelt, thanks!
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- dnr 13y ago
  I've been using it for a while, thanks! I had my own cli-based password manager, but yours is simpler and better. I've made a few tiny hacks to make it work better for me: - add a default length to the generate command - allow abbreviating 'generate' as 'gen' - default to copying to clipboard instead of stdout - use xsel instead of xclip (no real reason except I already had it installed everywhere)
- 616c 13y ago
  I eventually want to make a GUI equivalent as I learn to program, and had some other ideas that you have inspired as I try to get back to programming. THANK YOU! I love your tool and it is one of my favorite tools. I check your git for other cool stuff as I stumbled upon your stuff many times. Question: would you want to add a parameter to escape non-aplhanumeric characters? It took me a while of playing to figure out how to get mutt to handle my very complex IMAP passwords. For anyone who cares, I do it with sed. set my_pass=`pass email/this@email.org | sed 's/[[:punct:]]/\\&/g'` #
  - ygra 13y ago
    Random question (I have no clue of mutt or Unix shells (the code there looks like one)): But isn't that a problem of the receiving application? You can't really ask every single application that outputs text to sprout arguments to support every possible escaping that might be needed eventually. And whatever comes out of the `foo` part shouldn't be interpreted or parsed anyway, right?
  - aidenn0 13y ago
doorhammer 13y ago
This is convenient timing for me. I was just thinking about dual booting to a stripped down cli only arch install on my netbook for fun. I hadn't even thought about having some basic spreadsheet functionality. Should be interesting to mess around with. Not an office app, but I think tmux is probably my favorite all around need-to-have, for when I'm working cli only. edit: this also makes me think it wouldn't be too hard to write an excel as a service layer on a normal windows machine, then use the cli comp to interface with it. You wouldn't get the fancy formatting, but you could pretty easily get the calculations and such, as well as some basic formatting. Also not tough to make it save itself and send it out via outlook or whatever you want. Without all the nutty formatting, the data transmission could be pretty light weight. Wonder if anyone's done that. Might screw around with it if I have spare time
- omaranto 13y ago
  Using a cli for everything is an extreme proposition! You'll probably get tired of it quickly and choose to add some fullscreen text mode programs to the mix, like vim or emacs. For a "full featured" console environment, add some programs that use the frame buffer to display images, you can probably setup your netbook to be pretty serviceable without installing a windowing system at all.
  - doorhammer 13y ago
    Yeah; I use vim as my editor of choice (outside of my job which is actually .net, heh). I have other computers I use a lot, and I'd never 100% give up on gui's. Mostly I'd be setting up an environment that boots quickly, reduces background processes, and gives me a nice retro place to code in when I'm tooling with haskell or c. I also like having an environment that I've fully optimized for keyboard only. The excel part would just be an interesting convergence of what I do at work with windows, and what I use mostly at home. I've never messed with frame buffers in terminal; that'd be really interesting. Maybe I'll see if I can get to something more fully functional after all. I've always gone pretty much easy-mode when it comes to linux. I want to get more hands-on with the distro
harrystone 13y ago
Roaring Penguin's remind is a great piece of software, it's been a standard for me since around 2000. Don't forget their include files for stuff like holidays and seasons.
- aidenn0 13y ago
  If you haven't used wyrd, go check it out. You'll thank me later. http://pessimization.com/software/wyrd/ http://pessimization.com/software/wyrd/
russellallen 13y ago
I'm a big command line fan, but vi/emac/nano are not word processors. They're text editors. You might be able to get close if you are using them to edit Markdown and running it through Pandoc (especially if you add in a non-commandline PDF viewer). But still. WordPerfect 5.1 - now that was a curses/command line word processor :) I don't know of a modern equivalent though.
- sharyanto 13y ago
  Also, vi/emacs/nano are not one would call "command-line" text editors (they are text-mode/console-based though). See "ed" for one.
- dfc 13y ago
  What is your definition of "word processor"? Emacs + auctex? Emacs + orgmode? Words are text. Do you feel better if section headings are bigger and take up more space than the text you are supposed to be working on: latex: https://i.stack.imgur.com/etFst.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/etFst.png org-mode: http://blog.nozav.org/public/images/tangotango_org.png http://blog.nozav.org/public/images/tangotango_org.png org-mode with pd preview: http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/lsYdK0C2RvQ/maxresdefault.jpg http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/lsYdK0C2RvQ/maxresdefault.jpg Or is emacs excluded from being a word processor because you can also use it for powerpoint presentations: http://salomie.ro/tudor/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/orgmode_presentation.jpg http://salomie.ro/tudor/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/orgmode_p...
  - russellallen 13y ago
    Well Emacs can almost but not quite be everything of course. But this is a pretty common distinction, surely? Words are text, but word processors have historically been focused on preparing documents for printing (or nowdays viewing a visual representation of a printed document onscreen, eg PDF). They handle differing visual layout (fonts, page breaks, margins, indenting). They are softwrapped and paragraph based not line based. Often they deal with formatting through styles - headers, bullet points, numbering. They usually handle inclusion of tables, images and other non-text elements. The most common example of a word processor, Word, also handles collaborative writing with tracked changes and notes, and has inbuilt features such as on the fly word count, spelling and grammar checks. As I said, for a command line word processor look at WordPerfect for DOS or equivalent. What you are saying (and it is not entirely wrong) is that you can approximate a word processor by matching a text editor with a bunch of other programs (TeX, Pandoc, aspell etc). But that doesn't make the text editor a word processor.
ams6110 13y ago
The author seems to be advocating text mode, not strictly command-line. Editing files with sed is command-line; editing them with vi or emacs or nano is not.
- marcuskaz 13y ago
  Maybe terminal is a better phrase I should of used than command-line, or maybe non-X or non-Windowing environment
  - aidenn0 13y ago
    Text-mode is the term I use; I've heard "TUI" used as well. Non-windowing isn't a good name since I think this is clearly windowed: http://superuser.com/a/323614 http://superuser.com/a/323614
- ygra 13y ago
  Or with ed. But to many that's equally painful.
  - acheron 13y ago
    Or, God forbid, MS-DOS's version "edlin".
rsl7 13y ago
taskwarrior !
zdw 13y ago
Also worth looking at: http://www.ledger-cli.org http://www.ledger-cli.org
ekianjo 13y ago
Would be good to add Task Warrior on top of Todo.txt, though.
jclulow 13y ago
Shameless plug for more terminal-based slide/presentation software: now with fading, 256 colour transitions and experimental PDF export! http://github.com/jclulow/vtmc http://github.com/jclulow/vtmc
- dhimes 13y ago
  allow for both the Correct and the American spellings … Very funny. :-)
- arnemart 13y ago
  Very nice! I have made one as well[1], it is based on Markdown and not nearly as fancy. [1]: https://github.com/arnemart/slid.js https://github.com/arnemart/slid.js
- ajstarks 13y ago
  Here's another: deck, a Go package for presentations http://github.com/ajstarks/deck http://github.com/ajstarks/deck https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/deck-a-go-package-for-presentations https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/deck-a-go-package-for-prese...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
pjmlp 13y ago
Or, how to live in UNIX System V, CP/M and MS-DOS days.
- gaius 13y ago
  The good old days, I call 'em!
timonv 13y ago
Hah. Great article! Also: * https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup for decentralised and lightning fast email. Written in Ruby, very hackable. * http://orgmode.org/ http://orgmode.org/ Although I'm a vim user, I use orgmode for: All my todos, clocking hours for clients, spreadsheets for my training, research notes, calendar, anything else that needs organising and planning.
- reirob 13y ago
  How do you use orgmode in vim? I would love to have orgmode in vim.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    I think timonv uses vim except for orgmode. In any case, there's https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer
lorenzfx 13y ago
shameless plug: if you want terminal calendaring with CalDAV support you might want to try khal [0], it's still in an early stage of development but it already seems to work well enough for quite a bunch of people. [0] https://github.com/geier/khal/ https://github.com/geier/khal/
patrikj 13y ago
For me, the big one missing would be Skype. There seems to be a command line client called Clisk though, so perhaps that might be worth checking out.
girvo 13y ago
I'm writing a book, in my terminal. Have been for a while now, maybe 6 months, and all done through an amazing application called Wordgrinder. An old version should be in your distros repository (I know it's in Debian anyway). It's awesome to boot up to TTY1 and just start writing, no distractions possible. It's also entirely written in C and Lua so it's quite fun to hack on as well.
dhimes 13y ago
I've finally hit upon an electronic calendar scenario I am happy enough with to try for a few months. I use calcurse, with the main directory for daily, and subdirectories for Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly. I have aliases defined to reach these subdirectories because I am lazy: # calcurse stuff export Week='-D .calcurse/Weekly' export Month='-D .calcurse/Monthly' export Quarter='-D .calcurse/Quarterly' export Year='-D .calcurse/Yearly' I use tmux and a startup script to open daily, weekly, and monthly #!/bin/bash # Start a session named cal, name the window "Day", # pane. Detach the session for the setup process. tmux new -s cal -n Day -d # Create second window named "Week", split it and select left pane tmux new-window -t cal:1 -n 'Week' # Create a third window named "Month", split and select left tmux new-window -t cal:2 -n 'Month' # Load the calendars ## Note ^M and Enter seem to do the same thing tmux send-keys -t cal:0 'calcurse' ^M tmux send-keys -t cal:1 'calcurse $Week' ^M tmux send-keys -t cal:2 'calcurse $Month' Enter # Select window 0 and re-attach the session so we can reach it. tmux select-window -t cal:0 tmux attach -t cal Now I can set up tasks and priorities, and update according to the work plan. Share via rsyn. And not dependent on the cloud (I can rsync to a stick). Drawback; it is not integrated with Evolution or Thunderbird.
- dhimes 13y ago
  Just for future record, the script I actually use has two returns at the end of the send-keys lines tmux send-keys -t cal:0 'calcurse' ^M ^M tmux send-keys -t cal:1 'calcurse $Week' ^M ^M tmux send-keys -t cal:2 'calcurse $Month' Enter Enter

131 points by marcuskaz 13y ago

This is actually a list of obscure (20 years of Linux use here, and I haven't heard of most of them) command-line utilities. Definitely going to explore calcurse

jamessb 13y ago
I'd consider aspell and remind to be well known linux tools. Pandoc is more modern, but probably the most widely used markup conversion tool. Gnuplot and matplotlib are both very popular for graphing.

aidos 13y ago

I was totally unaware of sc. My spreadsheeting life just got immeasurably better.

username42 13y ago
it was very famous 20 years ago when X configuration required complex frequency calculus.
- aidenn0 13y ago
  Fun fact: The first time I tried ubuntu, in order to get my monitor working at its highest resolution I had to add a modeline to my xorg.conf I had been previously using gentoo, where I selected the resolution from a gui. The difference was seems to be ubuntu adopting nouveau a bit earlier than they should have.

zx2c4 13y ago

The author of this article uses pass [1] for password management. I'm the author of pass, if anyone here has any questions. [1] http://www.zx2c4.com/projects/password-store/ http://www.zx2c4.com/projects/password-store/

marcuskaz 13y ago
great tool, thanks!
illbert 13y ago
Just added it to my cli toolbelt, thanks!
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
dnr 13y ago
I've been using it for a while, thanks! I had my own cli-based password manager, but yours is simpler and better. I've made a few tiny hacks to make it work better for me: - add a default length to the generate command - allow abbreviating 'generate' as 'gen' - default to copying to clipboard instead of stdout - use xsel instead of xclip (no real reason except I already had it installed everywhere)
616c 13y ago
I eventually want to make a GUI equivalent as I learn to program, and had some other ideas that you have inspired as I try to get back to programming. THANK YOU! I love your tool and it is one of my favorite tools. I check your git for other cool stuff as I stumbled upon your stuff many times. Question: would you want to add a parameter to escape non-aplhanumeric characters? It took me a while of playing to figure out how to get mutt to handle my very complex IMAP passwords. For anyone who cares, I do it with sed. set my_pass=`pass email/this@email.org | sed 's/[[:punct:]]/\\&/g'` #
- ygra 13y ago
  Random question (I have no clue of mutt or Unix shells (the code there looks like one)): But isn't that a problem of the receiving application? You can't really ask every single application that outputs text to sprout arguments to support every possible escaping that might be needed eventually. And whatever comes out of the `foo` part shouldn't be interpreted or parsed anyway, right?
- aidenn0 13y ago

doorhammer 13y ago

This is convenient timing for me. I was just thinking about dual booting to a stripped down cli only arch install on my netbook for fun. I hadn't even thought about having some basic spreadsheet functionality. Should be interesting to mess around with. Not an office app, but I think tmux is probably my favorite all around need-to-have, for when I'm working cli only. edit: this also makes me think it wouldn't be too hard to write an excel as a service layer on a normal windows machine, then use the cli comp to interface with it. You wouldn't get the fancy formatting, but you could pretty easily get the calculations and such, as well as some basic formatting. Also not tough to make it save itself and send it out via outlook or whatever you want. Without all the nutty formatting, the data transmission could be pretty light weight. Wonder if anyone's done that. Might screw around with it if I have spare time

omaranto 13y ago
Using a cli for everything is an extreme proposition! You'll probably get tired of it quickly and choose to add some fullscreen text mode programs to the mix, like vim or emacs. For a "full featured" console environment, add some programs that use the frame buffer to display images, you can probably setup your netbook to be pretty serviceable without installing a windowing system at all.
- doorhammer 13y ago
  Yeah; I use vim as my editor of choice (outside of my job which is actually .net, heh). I have other computers I use a lot, and I'd never 100% give up on gui's. Mostly I'd be setting up an environment that boots quickly, reduces background processes, and gives me a nice retro place to code in when I'm tooling with haskell or c. I also like having an environment that I've fully optimized for keyboard only. The excel part would just be an interesting convergence of what I do at work with windows, and what I use mostly at home. I've never messed with frame buffers in terminal; that'd be really interesting. Maybe I'll see if I can get to something more fully functional after all. I've always gone pretty much easy-mode when it comes to linux. I want to get more hands-on with the distro

harrystone 13y ago

Roaring Penguin's remind is a great piece of software, it's been a standard for me since around 2000. Don't forget their include files for stuff like holidays and seasons.

aidenn0 13y ago
If you haven't used wyrd, go check it out. You'll thank me later. http://pessimization.com/software/wyrd/ http://pessimization.com/software/wyrd/

russellallen 13y ago

I'm a big command line fan, but vi/emac/nano are not word processors. They're text editors. You might be able to get close if you are using them to edit Markdown and running it through Pandoc (especially if you add in a non-commandline PDF viewer). But still. WordPerfect 5.1 - now that was a curses/command line word processor :) I don't know of a modern equivalent though.

sharyanto 13y ago
Also, vi/emacs/nano are not one would call "command-line" text editors (they are text-mode/console-based though). See "ed" for one.
dfc 13y ago
What is your definition of "word processor"? Emacs + auctex? Emacs + orgmode? Words are text. Do you feel better if section headings are bigger and take up more space than the text you are supposed to be working on: latex: https://i.stack.imgur.com/etFst.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/etFst.png org-mode: http://blog.nozav.org/public/images/tangotango_org.png http://blog.nozav.org/public/images/tangotango_org.png org-mode with pd preview: http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/lsYdK0C2RvQ/maxresdefault.jpg http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/lsYdK0C2RvQ/maxresdefault.jpg Or is emacs excluded from being a word processor because you can also use it for powerpoint presentations: http://salomie.ro/tudor/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/orgmode_presentation.jpg http://salomie.ro/tudor/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/orgmode_p...
- russellallen 13y ago
  Well Emacs can almost but not quite be everything of course. But this is a pretty common distinction, surely? Words are text, but word processors have historically been focused on preparing documents for printing (or nowdays viewing a visual representation of a printed document onscreen, eg PDF). They handle differing visual layout (fonts, page breaks, margins, indenting). They are softwrapped and paragraph based not line based. Often they deal with formatting through styles - headers, bullet points, numbering. They usually handle inclusion of tables, images and other non-text elements. The most common example of a word processor, Word, also handles collaborative writing with tracked changes and notes, and has inbuilt features such as on the fly word count, spelling and grammar checks. As I said, for a command line word processor look at WordPerfect for DOS or equivalent. What you are saying (and it is not entirely wrong) is that you can approximate a word processor by matching a text editor with a bunch of other programs (TeX, Pandoc, aspell etc). But that doesn't make the text editor a word processor.

ams6110 13y ago

The author seems to be advocating text mode, not strictly command-line. Editing files with sed is command-line; editing them with vi or emacs or nano is not.

marcuskaz 13y ago
Maybe terminal is a better phrase I should of used than command-line, or maybe non-X or non-Windowing environment
- aidenn0 13y ago
  Text-mode is the term I use; I've heard "TUI" used as well. Non-windowing isn't a good name since I think this is clearly windowed: http://superuser.com/a/323614 http://superuser.com/a/323614
ygra 13y ago
Or with ed. But to many that's equally painful.
- acheron 13y ago
  Or, God forbid, MS-DOS's version "edlin".

rsl7 13y ago

taskwarrior !

zdw 13y ago

Also worth looking at: http://www.ledger-cli.org http://www.ledger-cli.org

ekianjo 13y ago

Would be good to add Task Warrior on top of Todo.txt, though.

jclulow 13y ago

Shameless plug for more terminal-based slide/presentation software: now with fading, 256 colour transitions and experimental PDF export! http://github.com/jclulow/vtmc http://github.com/jclulow/vtmc

dhimes 13y ago
allow for both the Correct and the American spellings … Very funny. :-)
arnemart 13y ago
Very nice! I have made one as well[1], it is based on Markdown and not nearly as fancy. [1]: https://github.com/arnemart/slid.js https://github.com/arnemart/slid.js
ajstarks 13y ago
Here's another: deck, a Go package for presentations http://github.com/ajstarks/deck http://github.com/ajstarks/deck https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/deck-a-go-package-for-presentations https://speakerdeck.com/ajstarks/deck-a-go-package-for-prese...

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

pjmlp 13y ago

Or, how to live in UNIX System V, CP/M and MS-DOS days.

gaius 13y ago
The good old days, I call 'em!

timonv 13y ago

Hah. Great article! Also: * https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup https://github.com/sup-heliotrope/sup for decentralised and lightning fast email. Written in Ruby, very hackable. * http://orgmode.org/ http://orgmode.org/ Although I'm a vim user, I use orgmode for: All my todos, clocking hours for clients, spreadsheets for my training, research notes, calendar, anything else that needs organising and planning.

reirob 13y ago
How do you use orgmode in vim? I would love to have orgmode in vim.
- icebraining 13y ago
  I think timonv uses vim except for orgmode. In any case, there's https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer

lorenzfx 13y ago

shameless plug: if you want terminal calendaring with CalDAV support you might want to try khal [0], it's still in an early stage of development but it already seems to work well enough for quite a bunch of people. [0] https://github.com/geier/khal/ https://github.com/geier/khal/

patrikj 13y ago

For me, the big one missing would be Skype. There seems to be a command line client called Clisk though, so perhaps that might be worth checking out.

girvo 13y ago

I'm writing a book, in my terminal. Have been for a while now, maybe 6 months, and all done through an amazing application called Wordgrinder. An old version should be in your distros repository (I know it's in Debian anyway). It's awesome to boot up to TTY1 and just start writing, no distractions possible. It's also entirely written in C and Lua so it's quite fun to hack on as well.

dhimes 13y ago

I've finally hit upon an electronic calendar scenario I am happy enough with to try for a few months. I use calcurse, with the main directory for daily, and subdirectories for Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly. I have aliases defined to reach these subdirectories because I am lazy: # calcurse stuff export Week='-D .calcurse/Weekly' export Month='-D .calcurse/Monthly' export Quarter='-D .calcurse/Quarterly' export Year='-D .calcurse/Yearly' I use tmux and a startup script to open daily, weekly, and monthly #!/bin/bash # Start a session named cal, name the window "Day", # pane. Detach the session for the setup process. tmux new -s cal -n Day -d # Create second window named "Week", split it and select left pane tmux new-window -t cal:1 -n 'Week' # Create a third window named "Month", split and select left tmux new-window -t cal:2 -n 'Month' # Load the calendars ## Note ^M and Enter seem to do the same thing tmux send-keys -t cal:0 'calcurse' ^M tmux send-keys -t cal:1 'calcurse $Week' ^M tmux send-keys -t cal:2 'calcurse $Month' Enter # Select window 0 and re-attach the session so we can reach it. tmux select-window -t cal:0 tmux attach -t cal Now I can set up tasks and priorities, and update according to the work plan. Share via rsyn. And not dependent on the cloud (I can rsync to a stick). Drawback; it is not integrated with Evolution or Thunderbird.

dhimes 13y ago
Just for future record, the script I actually use has two returns at the end of the send-keys lines tmux send-keys -t cal:0 'calcurse' ^M ^M tmux send-keys -t cal:1 'calcurse $Week' ^M ^M tmux send-keys -t cal:2 'calcurse $Month' Enter Enter