I really enjoy using a command-line interface instead of a graphical user interface, and was wondering if anyone had any solid recommendations for applications that one can use in a terminal window.
Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?
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Re: Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?
#2I agree. A lot of them come with a UNIX system, although there are others. I use some of the moreutils stuff. For email, I use Heirloom-mailx. For text editing, I use vim. For database I use SQLite. For typesetting I use TeX. For processing pictures I implemented my own package called Farbfeld Utilities. For making MOD/XM musics, I wrote AmigaMML which uses a text file rather than the GUI that many other programs do. Hopefully other people on here can mention even more, because I am interested in the answer too, and probably my answer is insufficient to the original asker anyways.
Re: Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?
#3A few of the ones I use almost daily
- Pandoc a handy document format converter: https://pandoc.org/ - Ripgrep, a faster grep: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep - There are quite a few prompt-toolkit based CLI which have been really nice: * mycli (https://github.com/dbcli/mycli), pgcli (https://github.com/dbcli/pgcli) * ptpython/ptipython (https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/ptpython) - Youtube-dl: http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ - fzf a fuzzy finder for the console: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf - jq for JSON manipulation: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ - Miller for CSV/TSV: https://github.com/johnkerl/miller
I would imagine you have already scoured the "awesome" lists: https://github.com/agarrharr/awesome-cli-apps#terminal-utili...
Re: Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?
#4Maybe the best part of bash for me is AWK - so useful, and enjoyable to use. I use ffmpeg a lot for making movies from images, video conversion etc. I use Sage on the command line, mostly for programming in Cython and mathematical stuff with the Sage/Python REPL. It was 2.7GB (!) and comes with an absurd number of libraries and packages[0], mostly for maths and graphics. I started by using it in a browser notebook, but switched to the command line and never went back.
Re: Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?
#5Ncdu
Re: Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?
#6A few of the ones I use almost daily - Pandoc a handy document format converter: https://pandoc.org/ - Ripgrep, a faster grep: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep - There are quite a few prompt-toolkit based CLI which have been really nice: * mycli ( https://github.com/dbcli/mycli ), pgcli ( https://github.com/dbcli/pgcli ) * ptpython/ptipython ( https://github.com/prompt-toolkit/ptpython ) - Youtube-dl: http://rg3…
Thank you so much for posting that list, somehow it slipped under my radar. Great suggestions!
Re: Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?
#7vim
It's really worth the time to learn. It's pre-installed basically everywhere, it's amazingly useful. It has the features of a modern text editor all in a command line.
Re: Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?
#8I love watch.
watch df -h
watch ls -sh
watch cat file
watch nmcli device wifi list
watch -n 10 --color curl -s wttr.inRe: Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?
#9If you need to handle XML, xmlstarlet (http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net) is fantastic, and much more powerful than the standard line-oriented tools like sed and awk for this task.
Similarly jq (https://stedolan.github.io/jq/) for JSON data is great.
Re: Ask HN: Best Command-Line Applications?
#10I'm not big on applications, period. Activities should be decomposed (or at least decomposable) into individual actions that I can stitch together in the shell.