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Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?

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Re: Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?

#111

Post by weavie »

spondyl wrote: post #89
jodrellblank wrote: post #18

If you aren't using tmux or screen, you probably should be, especially over SSH sessions. They allow you to have multiple consoles open and switch between them, split window, and disconnect from SSH and then reconnect with all your things still open and running (as long as the server stayed running).

As someone who hasn't invested much time into tmux/screen, what are the benefits of it over just using eg; multiple terminal tabsn or using the terminal's built in split windowing? I'm sure there's probably a benefit but I dunno what it is

It persists your session, so if you get disconnected you can just log in again and 'tmux attach' to resume from where you left off. Any long running commands will still be running.

Re: Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?

#112

Post by cerberusss »

spondyl wrote: post #89
jodrellblank wrote: post #18

If you aren't using tmux or screen, you probably should be, especially over SSH sessions. They allow you to have multiple consoles open and switch between them, split window, and disconnect from SSH and then reconnect with all your things still open and running (as long as the server stayed running).

As someone who hasn't invested much time into tmux/screen, what are the benefits of it over just using eg; multiple terminal tabsn or using the terminal's built in split windowing? I'm sure there's probably a benefit but I dunno what it is

Both tmux and screen allow you to attach/detach. Thus you can log off, and you can pick up your session later.

For example, yesterday I logged into a Linux server at DigitalOcean via SSH. I ran tmux, started a long-running job, detached the session. I closed my laptop to go home for lunch. When I returned at my desk, I logged into the server and reattached the tmux session so I could see the results.

Re: Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?

#113

Post by sebcat »

inp wrote: post #87

Nice question! Here my personal setting: - Email : mutt [ http://www.mutt.org/ ] - Passwords manager : pass [ https://www.passwordstore.org/ ] - Navigate directories : autojump [ https://github.com/wting/autojump ] - Task manager : task [ https://taskwarrior.org/ ] - Music : cmus [ https://cmus.github.io/ ] - Text editor : emacs -nw [ https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ ]

A few of these (all?) are TUIs and not CLIs.

CLIs are command driven. TUIs are driven by user interactions. I'm sure more/better distinctions between the two can be made.

Re: Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?

#115

Post by amelius »

bwoodward wrote: post #103

I use the following (in no particular order) -- definitely nothing fancy. * weechat * ffmpeg * youtube-dl * zsh * watchman ( https://facebook.github.io/watchman ) * megadl (rarely, but its a handy tool when you need it) * brew (on my mac) * mountsshfs (on my mac) --- I moved away from orgmode and have been using it in VS since I have it open anyway. It covers me. I also want to start using Mutt or something similar.…

There's a Firefox extension that let's you open a youtube webpage with e.g. youtube-dl:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-with/

Sometimes, using a GUI is easier than a CLI :)

Re: Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?

#117

Post by PJ_Maybe »

CJefferson wrote: post #96
PJ_Maybe wrote: post #95

dtrx - Do The Right Extraction. It's a tool "for Unix-like systems that takes all the hassle out of extracting archives": https://brettcsmith.org/2007/dtrx/ In Debian/Ubuntu you can install via apt. Also, I'd second tldr which has been mentioned here already. It provides simplified man pages which common usage examples that normally fit on a few lines on screen: https://tldr.sh/

Dtrx is awesome, but is unfortunately slowly dying, as the author seems to have abandoned it -- it can't be installed with pip anymore. I think I'm going to take it over, just need a name...

Yeah it looks rather unmaintained, but can still be installed via apt on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. So yeah should be fine for a few years to come if you are a Ubuntu user (the system I use, I have no idea about other distros).

Re: Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?

#118

Post by [deleted] »

IgorrrR wrote: post #92

I became addicted to these great tools all written in Rust: fselect - https://github.com/jhspetersson/fselect ripgrep - https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep exa - https://the.exa.website They are the replacements for traditional find, grep, and ls.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?

#119

Post by JustFinishedBSG »

skrebbel wrote: post #73

Scoop - https://scoop.sh It's basically apt/brew on Windows, but it's particularly awesome because it does not manage dependencies. It just downloads and extracts installers, which works because every self-respecting program that works on Windows distributes binaries as an installer (or just a zip) somewhere. Result: everything just works, every program is self-contained, no admin rights needed, no package maintainer…

> no admin rights needed,

> Make sure Powershell 3 (or later) and .NET Framework 4.5 (or later) are installed.

Yeah not exactly. Wouldn't work in most ( all ? ) the places I worked at.

Re: Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?

#120

Post by amelius »

nanna wrote: post #104

- pdfgrep : grep search pdfs - htop : A nicer version of the process viewer top - rename : bulk rename things via a regex/sed-like interface - youtube-dl -x : download the audio of a video - locate : Find something anywhere.

> locate : Find something anywhere.

I strongly dislike updatedb, which is always stealing CPU cycles at inconvenient moments, and locate often seems out of date.

We should have had instant, database-like indexing in our filesystems ages ago.

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