Big fan of commandline tools such as vim, htop etc. What is in your opinion must have tools?
k9s is a game changer
I basically live in
nvim. Being able to configure my editor in an actual programming language makes it so much more useful to me thanvimcould ever be.Ncdu is a really useful little utility that shows you what directories are using the most space on whichever drive/directory you select. Really useful little piece of software.
hdparm is another neato one that let’s you test the read speeds of your drives, though it’s more so something ya use once and forget exists.
Also, though Neovim is more popular, Helix deserves some recognition. It’s a rust based, vim inspired text editor which removes the need to configure it, making it easier for people trying to get into terminal text editors.
Edit: Jerboa removed the first name, my bad.
I am thoroughly enjoying using mcfly.
yt-dlprangerandmc- both are file managers, and their approach is so different that I choose one of them I need at the moment depending on what do I want to do (mcfor traditional file management,rangerfor looking around the directory tree and peeking into files)htop,tmux- classicsweechat,profanity- for my IM needsripgrep- for searching through filesmagic-wormholefor file and ssh public key exchangemoshfor when the network conditions aren’t idealnmapto see if that machine I’ve connected into the network is up and what IP did it getbatfor quick looking into filesgdb, with mandatory gdb dashboardnvimfor serious text and code editing,microfor more casual editing
I have mostly replaced all command line stuff with Emacs, but there are still a few CLI utilities that I continue to use, whether I am in the CLI directly or whether I am using Emacs:
tmuxorscreen(terminal multiplexing)bash(shell scripting)grep,sed(filtering, formatting)ps,pgrep,pkill(process control)ls,find,du(filesystem search)ssh,nc,rsync,sshfs,sftp(remote access, file transfer)tee,dd(pipe control)less,emacs,diff,patch,pandoc(text editing)man,apropos(manual)tar,gzip,bzip2,xz(archiving)hexdump,base64,basenc,sha256sum(data encoding, checksums)wget,curl, (HTTP client)dpkg,apt-get,guix(package management)mpv(media player)ldd,objdump,readelf(inspecting binary files)zfs(maintaining my backup filesystem)
fzf for quickly matching file names especially deep in the directory hierarchy
ripgrep for quickly searching for text content within files
dtrx for handling the right extractions of different archive types
What is the difference between
ripgrepand just plain grep?ripgrepis a reimplementation ofgrepin Rust. It benchmarks faster for large file searches and also comes with quality of life features like syntax highlighting by default.
Switched reasently from FZF to Skim which is written in Rust (like ripgrep).
They might have specific uses that most users might not need and there may be better alternatives but some of the ones I’ve been using are:
CISO - A command line tool for making compressed ISO files that can be used in emulators and some video game consoles running custom firmware.
RAR - The Linux version of WinRAR, which doesn’t have a UI like the Windows version does.
Flatpak - Probably well known but in case a newer Linux user sees this, it’s used to download and install flatpaks from Flathub.
bat is a nice one








