My Favorite Unix Commands

Thu, Apr 26, 2018

This list is as much for me as for anyone else but I hope it’ll be useful to all parties in the future!

• midnight commander — command line file explorer.
• rlwrap — turn any repl into one that supports arrow keys and control-r to search through history.
• fzf — fuzzy find anything.
• lp — print from the command line.
• tree — pretty prints an entire directory.
• xclip — pipe into your clipboard.
• j — jump around instead of cd-ing.
• entr — run a command when a file changes.
• zathura — miles ahead of any other pdf viewer I’ve ever used. Live reload alongside with keyboard navigation.
• locate — find files all over your hard drive quickly.
• scrot — good for capturing screenshots.
• rg — I’ve also used ag for a long time quite happily.
• ruby — pretty obscure scripting language you might want to check out.
• jq — awesome language for manipulating json.
• whitespace (alias) recursively removes whitespace. whitespace="find -type f -exec sed -i 's/ *$//' {} +"
• static (alias) statically serve files in current directory alias static='ruby -run -e httpd . -p 9000'

More to come when I find them! I’d love to hear about any other good ones people know about.

P.S. I’m leaving out my favorite window manager, terminal, shell, etc. That’s another post :)