Linux

I think a lot of people don't realise that yt-dlp works for many sites, not just YouTube

I used it recently for watching a video from tiktok without having to use their god awful web UI and it was amazing

I use fuck to fix typos

grep goes crazy if you know your regex

jq - super powerful json parser. Useful by hand and in scripts

jq?

I'm a big fan of screen because it will let me run long-running processes without having to stay connected via SSH, and will log all the output.

I do a lot of work on customers' servers and having a full record of everything that happened is incredibly valuable for CYA purposes.

The pipe (|), which if you think about it is the basis for function composition.

nano was and still is vital to me learning and using linux, I will not learn how to use vim so if the distro forces it to be default im not using it.

Why is editing text so convoluted for seemingly no reason.. also hate that vim must be used for certain files.

Control+r == search through your bash history.

I used linux for ten years before finding out about that one.

I find myself using tldr a lot since finding out about it. It's just so useful for commands that I don't use enough to commit to memory.

awk

I know tmux is incredibly popular, but a good use case for it that isn’t common is teaching people how to do things in the terminal. You can both be attached to the same tmux session, and both type into the same shell.

bc

It's a simple command line calculator! I use it all the time.

zoxide. It's a fabulous cd replacement. It builds a database as you navigate your filesystem. Once you've navigated to a directory, instead of having to type cd /super/long/directory/path, you can type zoxide path and it'll take you right to /super/long/directory/path.

I have it aliased to zd. I love it and install it on every system

You can do things like using a partial directory name and it'll jump you to the closest match in the database. So zoxide pa would take you to /super/long/directory/path.

And you can do partial paths. Say you've got two directories named data in your filesystem.

One at /super/long/directory/path1/data

And the other at /super/long/directory/path2/data

You can do zoxide path2 data and you'll go to /super/long/directory/path2/data

Not powerful, but often useful, column -t aligns columns in all lines. EG

$ echo {a,bb,ccc}{5,10,9999,888} | xargs -n3
a5 a10 a9999
a888 bb5 bb10
bb9999 bb888 ccc5
ccc10 ccc9999 ccc888
$ echo {a,bb,ccc}{5,10,9999,888} | xargs -n3 | column -t
a5      a10      a9999
a888    bb5      bb10
bb9999  bb888    ccc5
ccc10   ccc9999  ccc888

yes

The most positive command you'll ever use.

Run it normally and it just spams 'y' from the keyboard. But when one of the commands above is piped to it, then it will respond with 'y'. Not every command has a true -y to automate acceptance of prompts and that's what this is for.

I don't see anyone mentions htop. So, I will:) Just works, could be installed in any distro. Much more friendly than top but isn't bloated with features as some other alternatives are.

CTRL-L to clear your terminal output. Or type clear

+1 for Caddy, completely replaced nginx. also...

• Starship - shell prompt
• tmux - terminal multiplexer
• parallel - parallel command runner
• restic - backup tool
• age - modern file encryption

yq is crazy cool for converting between different text-based data formats such as yaml, json, xml, csv and others, and it has a super nice pretty-printing function as well. I use it all the time!

Just be aware that your distroy might come with a yq variant too, but possibly one that isn't as powerful as the one I linked. I know this to be true at least for Ubuntu.

Using rust rewrite of coreutils you can cp -g to see progress. Set an alias :)

tmux - makes managing remote SSH sessions a breeze.

tomb - A little FOSS encryption utility that runs in the CLI. Easy, cute, effective. Tomb Utility

dd is probably well known, but one of the simplest and most powerful ways to accidentally delete all data on your hard drive. dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda

Man

I love ncdu for seeing where all my storage is being taken up.

pipeviewer or pv

socat - connect anything to anything

for example

socat - tcp-connect:remote-server:12345

socat tcp-listen:12345 -

socat tcp-listen:12345 tcp-connect:remote-server:12345

vd (VisiData) is a wonderful TUI spreadsheet program. It can read lots of formats, like csv, sqlite, and even nested formats like json. It supports Python expressions and replayable commands.

I find it most useful for large CSV files from various sources. Logs and reports from a lot of the tools I use can easily be tens of thousands of rows, and it can take many minutes just to open them in GUI apps like Excel or LibreOffice.

I frequently need to re-export fresh data, so I find myself needing to re-process and re-arrange it every time, which visidata makes easy (well, easier) with its replayable command files. So e.g. I can write a script to open a raw csv, add a formula column, resize all columns to fit their content, set the column types as appropriate, and sort it the way I need it. So I can do direct from exporting the data to reading it with no preprocessing in between.

sshfs

Discovered about rg recently and it is cool!

ddccontrol... it looks complicated on the surface but it's really not and being able to control monitor brightness without fcking around in some garbage monitor OSD is a god sent and should be the standard

I'm not sure how underrated it is but the exec feature in find is so useful, there are so many bulk tasks that would just be incredibly difficult otherwise but instead are just one line

xargs

ncdu

probably well known at this point but rsync is incredible and I use it all the time

kde connect

Use less for checking contents of files. Many people use cat all the time, but I don't like it, because if you do that often, your terminal window quickly gets flooded with stuff, and then you have to scroll up and down if you wanna see a previous output. With less, your file opens in a different "frame", which you can close when you're done.