About: I'm a #developer and a #writer. they/them. non-binary. ace
I love Linux and one thing I love about it is that you can set it up just right for yourself to make yourself super productive and make working in Linux very pleasant.
What are your favorite tools to setup and use?
EDIT: I was writing out a list of my own tools and that ended up turning into a blog post about my favorite linux tools. :)
I just set it up yesterday. I'm loving the command line highlighting!
✂️ CopyQ Clipboard Manager - cannot live without a clipboard manager anymore 😄
⚙️ Enhanced file path completion in bash - ZSH-style partial file path completion for Bash
✒️ Typora for writing my personal programming knowledge base in Markdown
🔄 And my terminal with my two most favorite Bash aliases:
open
alias open='xdg-open &>/dev/null'
open ./some-file.html
Opens the file in default browser
open .
Opens current directory in default file browser app (e.g. Dolphin)
alias clipboard="xclip -selection clipboard"
ls | clipboard
I didn't know about the mac-style open! I immediately added that to my .bashrc. AWESOME! :)
Just installed bat. It's amazing! Should be provided by standard package repos by default!
Fish Shell or prezto for zsh. Fnm instead of nvm. But yeah pretty much you just described standard setup.
I've used bat which is great but I've never heard of lsd. Installed it, and I'm loving it!
Since you've stated a few replacements for standard software rewritten in rust, I'd like to throw rg in the ring as well: RipGrep. A grep replacement written in Rust. Seems to be much faster.
Check out exa as well - replacement for ls written in Rust. Faster, better syntax highlighting, expanded options. Aliased ls='exa' on almost all of my systems
I use bad and fzf everyday. I love the UX that fzf provides, and how hackable it is to create new new commands/aliases from it.
Honestly, the single biggest thing for me has been Powerline on top of ZSH. It's wonderful being able to tell at a glance without reading anything whether it's a local or remote shell, root or not, what editing mode the prompt is in (I use vi-style line editing), and if in a git repo whether the working directory is clean or not.
Others for me include:
top even before finding htop. I now use htop in deference to almost anything else unless I need very specific info that could be found faster by querying /proc.tar command on steroids.Fish shell, tmux, nvim, links2, awk, htop, bat, fzf, fd, nano, the clipboard tool from gnome which I fail to remember the name, gpaste maybe? Btw, if you like command line highlight, you should try fish shell 😜.
I've tried fish and I liked it! It's got fantastic autocomplete suggestions based on history. That's been like the biggest feature for me with Fish.
Nice! take a look at this: github.com/edc/bass (for bash scripts).
You might not need Bass for simple use cases. A great simple alternative (suggested by @jorgebucaran) is to just use exec bash -c "source some-bash-setup.sh; exec fish".
it's the only caveat I can find about fish, it's not POSIX compliant.
Not necessarily a "productivity" tool, but I see nobody's mentioned mtr, which is a shinier version of traceroute in the same way that ncdu is to du.
GNOME To Do. Nested tasks with progress report is all that I need for keeping track of my stuff.
I don't have GNOME but I love these built-in GUI utilities that come with the desktop environments. KDE is a powerhouse with the amount of utils for it.
I rarely open a terminal without tmux (a terminal multiplexer like 'screen'). From there I run htop, vimwiki (for documentation), and various other utilities as needed.
copyq (already mentioned) helps a lot with terminal/app copy paste as well.
tmux is fantastic. I've slowly stopped using it as I utilize i3 and VIM more heavily.
But I'd like to get back into it. It's sooooo good.
First two are already addressed by Ivo Limmen comment:
Then:
The Silver Searcher/ag - A code-searching tool similar to ack(, but faster)
Neovim/nvim - Vim-fork focused on extensibility and usability
nnn - The missing terminal file manager for X
z - jump around, it will track your most used directories, based on 'frecency'.
My own nautilus.actions that use a few custom scripts to clone repos from URL in memory, copy paths, open repo page in browser, etc
my top tools I use all the time:
Here's my must-haves:
By the way, I use Ubuntu MATE.
I'm honestly not familiar with dwm, it looks interesting and I wouldn't mind trying it out but yeah, I haven't really heard much about it.
nice post! thanks for sharing. I just miss one tool:
ripgrep - a grep replacement which is fast, easy and nice to look at.
I just discovered broot last night. Its a really cool tree like command that allows you to do things with files and directory with a very nice fuzzy matching interface. It is quite different than fzf.
I've been using dwm for more than ten years, and I just don't change (I sometimes try some other VM, but always and up firing dwm).
I use a ton of bash aliases, they make my work that much quicker! I've seen a lot of people mention oh my zsh here, so I'm going to see if that's something for me!
I ♥️ ohmyz.sh
I use command line a lot and zsh helps me to write less to do more.