In this post I am going to present a few of my favorite command line tools that might be of interest to programmers who prefer to work directly from the terminal.
(Note: since I didn’t want to put screenshots or html, I removed the colors from the examples. Most of those tools actually make use of ANSI escaping to colorize their outputs)
ag – The Silver Searcher
$ ag LookAdjust
src/g_game.cpp
797:static int LookAdjust(int look)
823: look = LookAdjust(look);
865: yaw = LookAdjust(yaw);
This is like find and grep merged together into a simpler command.
Specially useful when searching large code base.
What I like about it is that it is extremely fast, as far as I can tell as fast as the file system allows it. It also automatically skips files from .gitignore, so it is prefect to quickly look for some functions or text in a project.
tig – Text mode interface for Git
2023-08-24 20:40 +0800 Guillaume o [master] {origin/master} {origin/HEAD} Attempt at fixing windows build since last commit
2023-08-23 16:02 +0800 Guillaume o Fix security issue in quickjs-libc.c
2023-07-24 18:11 +0800 Guillaume o Fix compilation on OSX
2023-07-23 23:13 +0800 Guillaume o Add an option to simplify exported glTF
2023-07-23 19:43 +0800 Guillaume o Optimize exported gltf mesh with meshoptimizer
You can use this as a replacement on any git log/show/diff/blame command and
you can then explore the output in a nice ncurses interface. It supports the
vim movement shortcut, pressing enter on any commit opens the diff in a
separate view.
By default, just typing ’tig’ in a project will shows the commit logs
This is the equivalent of a fancy git graphical interface, but without losing the advantages of the command line.
aunpack – Decompress archives of any type
An invaluable tool to decompress zip or any other archive files.
The best feature is that it automatically detects if the archive doesn’t have
a root directory and creates one before unpacking if needed, preventing
the annoyance of extracting many files in the wrong directory.
Who remembers all the arguments needed when calling unzip or tar?
$ aunpack blenderkit-v3.4.0.230122.zip
Archive: blenderkit-v3.4.0.230122.zip
creating: Unpack-8063/blenderkit/
inflating: Unpack-8063/blenderkit/__init__.py
inflating: Unpack-8063/blenderkit/thumbnails/vs_rejected.png
inflating: Unpack-8063/blenderkit/thumbnails/vs_uploaded.png
inflating: Unpack-8063/blenderkit/thumbnails/vs_uploading.png
inflating: Unpack-8063/blenderkit/thumbnails/vs_validated.png
...
blenderkit-v3.4.0.230122.zip: extracted to `blenderkit'
vifm – Vi file manager
This is similar to the famous midnight commander(mc) terminal file manager.
For some reason I never liked mc that much. I usually only want to
browse my file system and copy files from one directory to another, and
since I am a vim user, vifm does the job very well. I would not recommend
it to non vim users though, since all the shortcuts are the same as in vim.
~/Projects/goxel ~/Projects/goxel/src
*../ 4 K ../ 4 K
android/ 4 K assets/ 4 K
data/ 4 K formats/ 4 K
doc/ 4 K gui/ 4 K
ext_src/ 4 K mobile/ 4 K
osx/ 4 K tools/ 4 K
screenshots/ 4 K utils/ 4 K
snap/ 4 K action.c 2.5 K
src/ 4 K action.h 2.9 K
svg/ 4 K action.o 60 K
tools/ 4 K actions.h 2.3 K
AUTHORS 482 B assets.c 2 K
CHANGELOG.md 2.3 K assets.h 1.2 K
CONTRIBUTING.md 2.6 K assets.o 293 K
COPYING 34 K block_def.h 3.6 K
INTERNALS.md 1.3 K box_edit.c 5.7 K
Makefile 1.8 K box_edit.o 458 K
README.md 3 K camera.c 5.4 K
SConstruct 4.7 K camera.h 3.5 K
config.log 1.3 K camera.o 410 K
goxel 67 M config.h 1.4 K
icon.png 116 K dialogs_osx.m 928 B
todo 663 B file_format.c 2.3 K
file_format.h 2 K
ledger – Command-line, double-entry account reporting tool
Ledger is not just a command line tool, but mostly a text format to do
accounting. Keeping my finance in plain text files has a lot of advantages
for me since as a programmer I already have many tools to manage text files.
Ledger itself is not the simplest of the command from this list, but there is
hledger which provides a convenient ncurses interface to browse the data.
ncdu – NCurses Disk Usage
ncdu 1.18 ~ Use the arrow keys to navigate, press ? for help
--- /home/guillaume/Projects/goxel -------------------------
778.6 MiB [######################] /android
90.3 MiB [## ] /src
67.3 MiB [# ] goxel
59.4 MiB [# ] /.git
15.9 MiB [ ] /ext_src
1.3 MiB [ ] .sconsign.dblite
432.0 KiB [ ] /screenshots
420.0 KiB [ ] /data
412.0 KiB [ ] /osx
132.0 KiB [ ] /doc
128.0 KiB [ ] /svg
It seems that my computer is always low in disk space. Even though ubuntu graphical disk usage analyzer is quite good, sometimes it’s nice to be able to check my disk space from command line. Ncdu is another ncurses interface that does the job well and get out of the way.
pdf2txt – extracts text contents of PDF files
I sometimes use this tool when doing my company accounting, since until recently my bank only provided report in pdf format.
“python3 -m http.server” – serve local files on a web server
Not a tool er se, but a useful command that is worth memorizing. I use it for example if I want to quickly copy a file from my PC to my iPad.