Howdy y’all!
I’m curious about everyone’s favorite/most used CLI tool! Please include your favorite as well as your use case if you don’t mind. Mine is rsync, which I use to keep my home music storage synced with my music player’s SD card.
Runner up is ranger to navigate files. I mainly use this to quickly visually navigate mounted drives that I did not organize myself.
Hope to hear from you all soon, thanks!
ls
Not quite the answer I was expecting, but I still appreciate the participation.
Most used (estimated, excluding base utilities and package managers):
- micro
- git
- ssh
- tree
- (un)zip
- curl
- mpv
- fzf
- tar
- fastfetch
Favourite:
- fastfetch
- micro
- curl
- btop
- w3m
- scp
- wormhole
- mc (Midnight Commander)
- aerc
- 7z
fzf
Thank me later.
So a quick look at the man page says its a fuzzy search. How do YOU use it? So I can get a point of reference to figure things out myself.
The killer features for me are fuzzy command history match for bash (or zsh, or even powershell) and respectively interactive grep. Lots of other examples here: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/wiki/Examples#searching-file-contents
Good one, although I only use it as ctrl+t or ctrl+r or within scripts
Ripgrep my beloved
What’s your use case for ripgrep, or rather, what sets it apart from other tools for your uses?
It’s a replacement for grep, which searches the content of text files for a regular expression.
Ripgrep is very fast. If you use grep, it’s an easy drop-in.
rg is lovely.
Outside of the coreutils and builtins, I use git a lot for work, school, and otherwise. I prefer the simplicity and speed over a graphical client.
btop is probably one of my favourites, really easy and nice way to visualize the system status.
Most used? Probably…
- ls
- cd
- nano
- cat
- ssh
- ping
- grep
Favourite? Probably one of…
- yt-dlp_linux (for getting… stuff…)
- ffmpeg (for modifying a/v files)
- rsync (for pushing files to my media server)
You’re still using cd? Zoxide is great!
I prefer vifm to ranger.
Other than that it’s a tough question to answer because use the command line for everyday productivity, but
- neovim
- neomutt
- khal
- khard
- castget
rsync seems really low-level though, so let me also mention
- btm
- git
- ag
- find
Oh wow, there’s a command line email and calendar client. Thanks for bringing these to my attention. I’m still, slowly, learning vim keybinds so vifm is out for me.
What’s the difference between btm and top/btop? What does ag do for you differently than grep?
btm is one of many alternatives to top. It works very well for me because it is fast and has nice usability.
I found ag more intuitive to use, and it’s lightning fast. Here’s a detailed comparison of features: https://beyondgrep.com/feature-comparison/
Awesome, I’ll check the link out. Thanks for your time.
man
My use case is i’m a forgetful dipshit.
As a video editor (not professionally…just a hobbyist) anything to do with ffmpeg. Fast and easy to batch convert codecs, etc… Pretty much every function of most FOSS editors are built around ffmpeg, and nearly every function has a CLI equivalent. I mean, yeah, of course for a lot of those you have to have the GUI to see what you’re doing. But there’s plenty that can be done without even needing to open up your editor.
slnyancatNot useful, but fun.
Edir. Renaming files in the text editor.
slJust try it.
lazygit - git client
Mine are flac and ffmpeg
I’m familiar with the flac format, but not so much with the program. What do you use it for?
I’ve never heard of ffmpeg, but a quick glance at the man page says it can rip from data streams with sounds awesome! What’s your main use case if you don’t mind sharing?
Thanks, btw
I use flac to encode wav/aiff files to flac and to read flac fingerprints (md5) from flac files. I mainly use ffmpeg for ripping subtitles from mp4 files, but it’s a pretty versatile tool.
