Command-line tools and cheatsheets

Related posts

• Introduction to command-line interface
• A checklist for the command-line interface
• Advanced Git usage patterns
• Linux at the command line
• Bindkeys

Cheatsheets

I maintain a simple private cheatsheet as a repository for the cheat tool. Among many tools for cheatsheets:

• cht.sh is very comprehensive, it works based on very simple curl calls;
• cheat handles personal cheatsheets.

Details about configuration are to be found on the cheat documentation page
https://github.com/xoolive/cheatsheets

You may set up many cheatsheet sources, with order of precedence and more.

➜ cheat ncdu
# To save results to <file>:
ncdu -o <file>

# To read from <file>:
ncdu -f <file>

# To save results to a compressed file:
ncdu -o- | gzip > <file>

# To read from a compressed file:
zcat <file> | ncdu -f-

Modern command line tools

With the recent hype around Go and Rust, a lot of common command line tools have been rewritten to benefit from the performance of the language. Of course, not all modern tools are written with these languages, but I find it still worth mentioning.

Replacement tools

exa (Rust)

A replacement for the ls command.

bat (Rust)

bat is a cat clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration. It switches to your favourite pager when needed. bat is a great addition in your toolbox for piping results from other tools.

# Regular usage
bat readme.md
# Benefit from syntax highlighting
tail -f  /var/log/syslog | bat --paging=never -l log
# Pretty diff-ing
git diff --name-only --diff-filter=d | xargs bat --diff
# Preview window with fzf
fzf --preview 'bat --color=always --style=numbers --line-range=:500 {}'

autojump (Python)

autojump is a facility build around cd, which learns about the folder you often visit. It comes with few wrapper commands like j (jump), jo (jump and open file manager)

➜ j fonts
/home/xo/.local/share/fonts

jq (C)

This command-line JSON processor allows to slice, filter and transform structured data. This is a whole language in itself, documented here

System management tools

neofetch (Bash)

Command-line system information tool

htop (C)

An interactive process viewer

nvtop (C)

A htop-like task monitor for NVIDIA GPU. It is particularly useful to monitor memory usage.

Disk management and fuzzy finder

broot (Rust)

This tool is a great complement to ncdu, including fuzzy search and whale-spotting.

# Start broot and with size info, dates and permissions
br -sdp
# Whale spotting (sort by size, ignored and hidden files)
br -w
# Once inside the application
:fs       # filesystem analysis
:ss       # sort by size
:sd       # sort by date
ctrl+left # open or preview in new pane
alt+enter # open with xdg-open
c/        # search a match in file content

fd (Rust)

A simple, fast and user-friendly, alternative to ‘find’

ag, the silver searcher (C)

A code-searching tool similar to ack, but faster.

fzf (Go)

Command-line fuzzy finder

Network tools

dog (Rust)

Command line DNS client (alternate dig)

xh (Rust)

Friendly and fast tool for sending HTTP requests

Modern AI tools

tesseract (C++)

This is a performant command-line open-source OCR engine. The command-line tool wraps around the libtesseract library which includes top-notch ML models for line and character recognition.

xh https://www.xoolive.org/images/cli/609.jpg |\
tesseract stdin stdout |\
grep --color 609