devd, by Aldo Cortesi

Whenever I need to spin up a local server to work with bits of static HTML, I reach for devd. It’s a super fast, self-contained binary with great ergonomics. Running devd -lo . serves the current directory, opens (-o) your browser for you, and automatically livereloads (-l) your browser whenever any of the files change. It can do much more, including simulating bad connections, reverse proxying, and generating ephemeral self-signed TLS certificates, but I’m completely happy with just the basics.

• entr - watches files/directories and executes an arbitrary command when they change.
• stow - a utility for easily managing symlinked dotfiles
• smu - a small markup-like implementation that’s easy to pipe to.
• nmh - a unix-y approach to command line mail (I never really liked mutt). Basically nmh is made of a handful of small, discrete utils that are easy to pipe together.
• pycco - just started using this recently to make documentation easier to write - I’m not sure if I like the quality of documentation that comes out, but I definitely like how easy it is to keep docs up to date.
• youtube-dl - can download youtube/gyfcat/imgur videos (or gifvs), but I just download to stdout and pipe to mpv to stream them.
• qutebrowser - a minimal vim-like browser. Works with most sites I visit (and I have a keybinding to pop open youtube-dl/mpv when I’m on a site that youtube-dl supports.
• inox - patched version of chromium that supposedly doesn’t phone home to Google as much. I use it whenever qutebrowser doesn’t work on a site.

Linux/BSD/Xorg specific

• Basically anything from suckless.org, including st (a terminal emulator), slock (a minimal x screen locker), dwm (a small window manager) and dmenu (a searchable X menu).
• lemonbar - small X bar that is fed data by a pipe (flexible, so it can be used for other things like popup notifications too)
• xbanish - hides the mouse when you start typing

I’m not sure how many of these tools are really “unheard of”, but they’re definitely not common. I use all of them practically every day.

• par - A really handy utility for reflowing text in a particular column limit. Works well in source code with comments or email quotes. My favorite bit is that the man page contains an apology for its complexity. :-)
• git gui is one of the few tools I’m willing to leave my terminal for. I use it in particular for committing things in patch mode.
• bpython - A souped up Python interpreter. Not quite to the level of ipython, but has niceties like auto completion and doc string snippets.

These are probably pretty popular, but you already covered pass and (h)ledger so I don’t have much else to work with. :)

• Ragel, a state machine compiler.
• mosh, a mobile shell.
• chruby and ruby-install for managing Rubies.
• Anki, a flashcard app.

The text editor Sam by Rob Pike. Not as a day-to-day editor, but to replace of one-off Awk and Perl scripts.

I find the combination of command language, visible history and structural regular expression support is very useful in parsing large datasets and log files in an interactive way.

• z: jump around directories based on frecency
• mutt-kz: mutt with notmuch search superpowers, also does search-based virtual mailboxes.
• pandoc: probably more well-known, indispensable for making slides and short documents.
• Hakyll: great static site generator that uses a DSL for configuration and pandoc for Markdown -> HTML.
• openconnect: no more pesky Cisco Anyconnect to connect to work :).

xonsh lets you basically write python directly in your shell. Great for people who know how to do things in python and abhor bash-isms.

Taskwarrior has been mentioned here a few times but probably belongs on any list with pass and ledger.

I’m always surprised at how rarely known atool is: Wrapper around various archive formats to give unified interface and sensible default behaviours (e.g. no tarbombs).

I don’t know if it’s that unknown, but GNU parallel, and especially the parallel --pipe option, are pretty amazing. Any cpu-bound script that processes stdin lines (like a Python script) can be made multi-core with no fuss.

Combined with pv, you get a toolkit for UNIX-y multi-core dataflow with animated progress bars that work with all the existing tools you know and love.

parallel –pipe info

pv man page

hexdump -C is useful for all sorts of file examination.

On OpenBSD, scan_ffs has saved my butt more than once when a disk gets screwed up somehow.

     The basic operation of this program is as follows:

     1.    Panic.  You usually do so anyways, so you might as well get it over
           with.  Just don't do anything stupid.  Panic away from your
           machine.  Then relax, and see if the steps below won't help you
           out.

If you do anything with MySQL/MariaDB/Percona, the Percona Toolkit has some great utilities like pt-online-schema-change.

msmtp is my go-to for sending out e-mail from mutt, rather than trying to configure a whole postfix/opensmtpd instance to just relay to your actual mail server (and you get instant feedback if delivery fails, rather than it staying queued on your machine).

I wrote a post about this not too long ago, in which I mention my affection for mojo, jq, uniprops, and combine: http://hoelz.ro/blog/unsung-heroes-of-the-command-line

One tool I forgot to include in there is tig, a great curses UI for Git.

birthday(1), in FreeBSD Ports as misc/birthday, for giving me advance notice of upcoming birthdays and anniversaries when I log in, letting me appear to be on the ball. Simple text configuration, flags to tune the window.

Website appears to be erroring right now. I guess this helps affirm that this is a rarely-known tool? Looks like it’s probably https://sourceforge.net/projects/birthday/ (v1.6.2, as opposed to v1.5 in Ports).

I use dc a lot as my go-to calculator. It’s a quasi-standard reverse polish notation (RPN) command-line calculator. Quasi-standard in the sense that it is traditionally included in unix, but POSIX chose not to standardize it, instead only standardizing bc (which was historically a front-end to dc for people who didn’t want RPN). The only change from the default setup I have is the command 10k in my ~/.dcrc, which sets the precision on startup to 10 decimal places (the default is 0). I mostly use it for basic arithmetic, but it can do more complex things too.

dwdiff is a word-level diff utility. There are probably a lot of these, but I use this one.

ncdu is a pretty straightforward ncurses frontend to du, letting you navigate around and see what’s taking up space.

units, available in GNU and other versions, converts between units. I had gotten in the habit of converting units by typing things like “33 C in F” or “23.3 km in mi” into my browser’s search bar (both Google and Bing intercept and answer these kinds of queries), but after a period spent with unreliable internet and realizing these conversions shouldn’t actually need to call out to the internet (except perhaps currency conversions, if you want them up to date), I’ve been using units instead.

pdftk is a PDF swiss-army knife for various page-level operations like concatenating, splitting, and rotating.

ts which adds a timestamp prefix to each line passed to it on stdin. The feature I use mostly is ts -i which prefixes the elapsed time since the previous line was printed.

If you’re into C, cscope is highly recommended, eventhough its parsing is ad-hoc and its codebase is quite horrible. I’m avoiding mouse use with the aid of xclip, cwm (patched) amd Vimperator. A decade ago I used Synergy2, but it’s seldom useful.

qfind & qselect: fast, flagfree find . -iname foo with steroids and fuzzy-finder/filter to find exactly what I need interactively.

mmv by Aharon (Vladimir) Lanin (original source)

It’s an oldie but a goodie - allows for pattern-based mass renaming of files. Yes, I know how to mass rename files the “proper” way using shell loops, sed/tr, etc but using mmv is way quicker. It’s in the ports/packages repos of most operating systems.

I use ledger for my personal finances, Sam as my preferred text editor, es for shell scripts, uuterm, Irc.c, newsbeuter, and my own little wrapper-around-gpg-as-a-password-manager. Wonderful software (excluding my own).

I always say this, but tsort is one of those strange little Unix utilities that is a total waste of bytes right up until that point when you need to run a quick topological sort, at which point you are SO HAPPY that it exists.

I’m also a big fan of the combination of isync and mu for mail. It has much of the flavor of mh, but works reasonably with IMAP mail sources. As a 25+ year Emacs graybeard, I interface with it via mu4e, but even from the bare command line, it is supremely useful. I also hear good things about notmuch, which has much the same flavor.

• lr list files, recursively, which includes the best features of ls(1), find(1), stat(1) and du(1).
• xe simple xargs and apply replacement.

Both come with sane defaults resulting in a nice and easy usage in shell scripts and one liners. lr supports extensive filter expressions which come very handy.

Mercurial. Haha :-) just mourning :-(

I have the bad habit of writing my own homegrown solutions for many problems and non-problems. Those include a notetaking tool and a simple weather app </shamelessselfpromotion>

Some things I’ve found great(er) use in:

• The termite terminal emulator. Features keyboard-driven copy/paste/select, URL focusing, and good configurability. Good stuff.
• Not unheard of: awesomewm. But extremely cool as a glue-layer between tools, especially because it allows you to easily manage and create popup notifications. I’m writing my own “replacement”, as some might have noticed, but that’s another story. (I’m doing it again, aren’t I?)
• VimFx is a slightly less popular, but very convenient vim-layer for firefox.
• radare2 is a reverse engineering framework and much more, but some of it’s utilities have great value elsewhere as well, particularly rax2 for all things base conversion.

All other things I’d have mentioned, have been already.

I use ConTeXt for most of my slides and really like it, I just cannot find any good documentation on it :).

I’ve been through a lot of todo management tools (even wrote my own minimal solution) and I have to say my favourite todo tool is taskpaper.vim. It’s easy to overlook it as being just a syntax file for the taskpaper format, but actually the few keybindings it provides to mark tasks as done and archiving them are all you need. Key features it offers that are surprisingly hard to find elsewhere:

• Simple text-based format
• Ability to keep notes alongside a given task
• Ability to easily have different task lists for different projects
• Nested tasks