I use ripgrep on at least a daily basis, and not just for work. It is so much easier to use, and faster than standard grep.

xsv! At work people often communicate data via csv/tsv. For better or for worse these can sometimes be multiple gigabytes. xsv lets me easily slice and dice things, or shove together a quick Unix pipeline to process it in well under a minute before someone else can even set up whatever unnecessary distributed big data tool they are primed to reach for. Plus, being able to easily “join” two csvs on a column without any prep is a godsend.

/u/burntsushi should setup that github sponsors thing (or equivalent). Between xsv and the rust regex crate I owe him at least a couple beers.

Pbpaste, pbcopy

entr, ripgrep, fasd, fzf, bfs, + parallel, chronic, vidir and ts from the moreutils package.

Gron! It transforms JSON into greppable lines like path.to.items[3] = value, and if you like you can edit the result and use gron to transform the edited stuff back to JSON. This brings JSON structures into the line-oriented sed/grep/awk universe – I’m looking at you, Jupyter notebooks. I’ve only had gron for a few months, and it’s already my 13th-most-used command.

Example output (gron can read from stdin, files, and even URLs):

▶ gron testdata/two.json 
json = {};
json.contact = {};
json.contact.email = "mail@tomnomnom.com";
json.contact.twitter = "@TomNomNom";
json.github = "https://github.com/tomnomnom/";
json.likes = [];
json.likes[0] = "code";
json.likes[1] = "cheese";
json.likes[2] = "meat";
json.name = "Tom";```

vipe is pretty useful. Can do things like:

ls | vipe | wc -l

To manipulate intermediate results with your $EDITOR. I’ve re-implemented this tool in Haskell:

https://hackage.haskell.org/package/editpipe

One I can not live without anymore is hstr: https://github.com/dvorka/hstr

I find ffsend pretty useful to securely share files from the command line (shameless plug).

I use mc (Midnight Commander) a lot, alongside bmon and htop.

sl

https://packages.debian.org/buster/sl

Going through my history of commands,

grep -oP '(^| +\| +)\K[^ ]+' "$HISTFILE" | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n100

I see rg and pngquant as the two main commands that aren’t present by default on my Ubuntu set up. I also use my own aliases/functions. For example, I use 2lc frequently to check if last two commands are giving the same result (when I’m working on my cli books, answering on reddit/stackoverflow, etc).

2lc () 
{ 
    p1=$(fc -ln -2 | head -n1);
    p2=$(fc -ln -3 | head -n1);
    diff --suppress-common-lines -y -s <(eval command "$p1") <(eval command "$p2") | head -n5
}

Another is ch (inspired by https://explainshell.com/) to quickly extract information from manual for command line options (see https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help). For example:

$ ch rg -g
       rg - recursively search current directory for lines matching a pattern

       -g, --glob GLOB ...
           Include or exclude files and directories for searching that match the given glob.
           This always overrides any other ignore logic. Multiple glob flags may be used.
           Globbing rules match .gitignore globs. Precede a glob with a ! to exclude it. If
           multiple globs match a file or directory, the glob given later in the command line
           takes precedence.

I’m quite found of fuck.

Percol, jq and gron. I use these dozens of times per day. Also, fish shell, I find it superior to all others and don’t quite understand why anyone would use bash at this day an age.

I also use httpie, ag/ripgrep/ack, fd which are great, but they provide only incremental improvements on standard tools that work well. If I am writing shell scripts I always stick to curl, grep, find, etc.

Great thread.

choose replaces the usual awk oneliner to get a column of text for me. https://github.com/theryangeary/choose

$ echo first second third | choose 1
second

ripgrep, jump, fzf, httpie, direnv, pgcli, fuck, jq.

Though this is a TUI-app and not a CLI app that many of the others in this thread are, I have to mention Visidata. It is so handy for viewing and manipulating csv files.

One I find useful for Linux (or any system that uses X Windows) is xpaste. For example:

ls -l | xpaste

will copy the output of ls -l to the X windows primary selection (-s for the secondary selection, and -c for the clipboard selection). I wrote the opposite, xselect, to obtain the selection from from the command line. You might think “why? Isn’t that what the middle button, or ^C is for?” Because X allows multiple selections. I have a fragment of a web page highlighted in Firefox, and from there, I can select the following for as the selection:

• TIMESTAMP
• TARGETS (this list)
• MULTIPLE
• text/html
• text/_moz_htmlcontext
• text/_moz_htmlinfo
• UTF8_STRING
• COMPOUND_TEXT
• TEXT
• STRING
• text/x-moz-url

I don’t use them often, but when I need to, I’m glad they exist.

fzf, cht, fd, ripgrep, teip, batch, lf, kakoune in filter mode (kak -f), z.lua, lazygit

For K8s: stern is must-have.

See also,

https://lobste.rs/s/2mxwdm/rewritten_rust_modern_alternatives

nnn for me! It’s a great little file manager. Once you get used to using 1/2/3/4 you’ll love it. Also, batch rename is a masterpiece.

moreutils - specifically ifne shows up in my personal scripts quite a bit.

ncat - a more fully featured nc

pv - (not sure if it has a homepage) pipe viewer, monitor the amount of data going through pipes

dc - (also unsure of homepage) RPN equivalent of bc, the terminal calculator

• mosh
• iotop
• iftop
• mytop
• goaccess
• ripgrep

I like exa instead of ls. And few more tools I mention here.

Apart the tools I built myself, I quite like the set of commands of scm_breeze which shortens a lot of git commands and give aliases like $e1 to the files listed in git status.

As someone working a lot with logs and traces, lnav is a freaking lifesaver.

Some interesting ones I’ve found recently: quickstack (dump the stack for a running process), selfdock (lightweight docker alternative), dstat (aggregate performance statistics), pv (progress bar for Linux commands)

• fish: a shell that just works
• lucid.fish: my async git prompt for fish. Zero lag on big repos, which I work in all day.
• nvim: comes sanely configured out of the box! I’m not sure I even have a vim config set up yet and I barely notice.
• open to take a look at a directory in Finder. Handy for certain use cases that don’t fit neatly in a CLI workflow

Hmm, my workflow is quite boring I’m afraid. :)

The one I can’t live without is eshell’s rgrep; it shows its results in a hyperlinked buffer so you can jump right to the match.

Honorable mention to entr and htop tho; those are great.

xml2 and 2xml. Converts XML to a flat file-path like structure, with the other application doing the reverse.

This is the key application that allowed me to unlock a CLI-like pipeline for working with EagleCAD’s xml markup from the shell.

Docs are incredibly sparse though. The best resources I’ve founed aside for personally playing around with it follow:

• https://thelimberlambda.com/2017/08/11/shoutout-to-2xml2/
• https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man1/2xml.1.html

Most of the non standard tools I use were already mentioned, but I recently discovered progress it’s useful for the times I forget to use pv or the files are bigger than I thought.

For anyone who does anything with images ever, imagemagick and ffmpeg are absolutely necessary.

This highly featureful alternative to “ls” is my favorite, but I am a little biased ;-) : https://github.com/c-blake/lc

There’s “so common that that go on the base images for Production”:

• jq
• curl

and then there’s the stuff which doesn’t quite meet that threshold:

• git
• git-crypt
• ag (silversearcher)
• tree
• direnv
• pcregrep
• socat
• oathtool, qrencode
• psql
• xmlstarlet
• rlwrap

The other honorable mention is for one which is login shell startup and only occasionally invoked directly by me, but when I do invoke it, it’s helping to save me from social failure:

• birthday

This doesn’t count “stuff which I put in for the system, rather than for me”, such as etckeeper. Nor programming languages or tools to support them (Python, pyenv, go, cargo, etc). Even though sudo etckeeper unclean has been invoked more often than you might think.

hawk - a pretty awesome awk replacement. Also I know this is tangential, but gotta give some credit to iTerm - a fantastic price of software that makes the command line a very smooth experience for me. I haven’t seen many paid applications with that kind of polish.

The ones I use > 10 times daily are

• git-revise
• my relative jump command for fish

I use fx on daily basis with powerful .fxrc extensions.

Also I created my own ls command ll: https://github.com/antonmedv/ll

wtf

I use a lot of the same mentioned in this thread: rg, fzf, fd

But also, I use navi daily which is great.

vcprompt https://github.com/djl/vcprompt

I’ve had this in my terminal env configuration for a bout as long as I’ve been a programmer. I notice it’s no longer actively developed, are there better alternatives?

• ripgrep
• fzf
• tig
• git-absorb
• gh
• bat

• tree
• fzf
• fish
• ripgrep
• fd

Should be it.