Command Line Tools ALL Developers Should Know

Forrest is back

I cannot stress enought how much Vim/neovim made me more productive and the terminal overall. I use Fish on Alacrity and my favourite tools are Vim, Ranger, FZF, tmux and of course Git

Oh-My-Posh - awesome prompt styling, extremely customizable as well. Cross platform, multi-shell, supports nerd fonts and glyphs, and has segments for all kinds of things. Doesn't cause any noticeable lag. (It's written in go so it goes!) Comes with a ton of themes available, but it's really easy to customize. I have the same prompt on bash and powershell with segments to tell me which shell I'm currently using, do I currently have elevated permissions, where am I in the file system, current node version (if in a node project), current Golang version (if in a Go project), and exit code of last command. Then, I have a second line that only appears when I'm in a git repo, and gives me all the git information for the repo at a glance. Blinking cursor is on a third line, and I have some unicode bars connecting it all so it looks purdy. I customized it to work well with terminals that are taller than they are wide as I frequently have multiple shells open next to each other in a TMUX split, or the terminal open half screen and a browser on the other half when using only one screen.

You are the best, the perfect mix of helpful and entertaining. Congrats on 400k

That Steve Ballmer clip is always great.

Man, thank you so much! I was googling like crazy to find 'tldr', couldn't recall its name. Finally found it in this video. I'm a heavy user of this tool and found it extremely useful

Great video! I always heard tmux mentioned in videos, but had no clue what it was. I love using it!

Neovim with Tmux to manage sessions (ie one session open per project root directory) is 90% of what I use. There's also zsh with oh-my-zsh, FZF, Git, etc etc, but productivity wise I lean on Tmux a lot.

using a tiling window manager was massive for my productivity. when i suddenly had to start teaching online during covid it became clear how much time is wasted rearranging and resizing items in the display. impossible to not include git in the list also. all of the text processing tools in the gnu core utils. finally i think it is important to set aside a liitle time everyday or every week to automate, customize, optimize and simplify your workflow. Whether that is adding a couple of command aliases to your shell, or adding a couple of keybindings to your editor. Even adding some inbox rules to your email

grep, Vim, and tmux changed my life in the command line. Cannot recommend those tools enough.

I think that Windows users will appreciate scoop and oh my posh, which are my main recommendations. I use scoop to get some unix tools in Windows and as a secondary package manager (second to winget) for development stuff (deno, vim, bash, sass, tailwind css, among other programs available in it). Oh my posh just makes the powershell prompt pretty and useful for development to see git status, node status or dotnet status (you can customize it to your needs with the oh my posh docs)...

One thing I found very cool in bash/zsh is the Ctrl+R shortcut, it's a reverse fuzzy finder but for your recent commands in the shell; So, I never waste my time pressing the up arrow key.

Great content! I try to live in terminal because I find I can navigate faster cause I’m so used to. I started with Vim and stuck with it. Also, TLDR is definitely the right way to RTFM ha ha. Keep up the insightful content!

Neovim with tmux (to manages sessions and windows), for the shell i used zsh with starship for customization, ranger for my file manager, and zathura (even tough this isn't cli tools but it increase my productivity) for reading paper and books. Even tho recently i'm trying to integrate all those tools to be used from my neovim set-up or tmux for maximum productivity.

The file browser lf is pretty amazing. Super lightweight and easy to use.

Mcfly. A backwards search command tool. I have been using it for a couple of weeks now and it really increases my productivity.

Oh and ps I use that a lot especially when writing code to see what the resident size of my program is. Especially when writing a more involved C/C++ application then I want to be sure that it isn’t leaking memory. Even when my code checker says it’s okay I always check. And when I see NodeJS consume 90-150MB for something simple I decide to rewrite it in C++ or Rust because those containers will add up in cost! And since C++ or Rust is even 10 times faster we let definition require 10 times less for the same work load, saving lots and lots of money in the end.

I install pyenv to install and manage multiple versions of Python, nvm to install and manage multiple Node versions, and Starship to customise the prompt. I also have bat which is a good cat replacement. And batman (yep, that's what it's called) to produce better man pages (with colours and such). exa is also great (an ls replacement) which has syntax highlighting.

I'll save this for when i screw up my pc again :-)

The other thing with command line is extensibility. For example, if I keep typing rsync -haux --progress dir1 dir2 myserver:where/ever I can e.g. define a function via rs() { rsync -haux --progress "$@"; } so that instead I type rs dir1 dir2 myserver:where/ever (I use aliases to rename rm to remove to prevent accidently typing rm when I mean rs -- learned that a while back) or I can type cat > ~/bin/rs #!/bin/bash rsync -haux --progress "$@" ^D chmod a+x ~/bin/rs and I have a command than anything can run as if it were an executable. (I do this a lot since it means I can see the terminal above while typing out my program, whereas e.g. vim or nano take over the screen.)