
AstonJ
Which command line tools do you use?
I’ve been watching Prag Dave’s Elixir course and I noticed he uses tree:
Tree is a recursive directory listing program that produces a depth indented listing of files. Color is supported ala dircolors if the LS_COLORS environment variable is set, output is to a tty, and the -C flag is used. With no arguments, tree lists the files in the current directory. When directory arguments are given, tree lists all the files and/or directories found in the given directories each in turn. Upon completion of listing all files/directories found, tree returns the total number of files and/or directories listed.
On Mac install with: brew install tree
EG:
$tree
.
├── README.md
├── lib
│ └── hangman.ex
├── mix.exs
└── mix.lock
You can use the options to ignore directories or files.
Any other cool command line tools you know of or use?
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dimitarvp
In short, a heck ton of them. I can write a series of articles about which tools I use. I made it a credo to gather as much as possible CLI and TUI tools and become master at them. The latter part still eludes me – not enough time and energy still – but I have become quite the small encyclopaedia of CLI/TUI tools.
Waiting for Aston’s “you should write a blog about it Dimi!”.

Hallski
Another one for tree
, rg
and jq
.
Some others:
-
fzf
Fuzzy finder - GitHub - junegunn/fzf: A command-line fuzzy finder -
gh
Github CLI tool - https://cli.github.com -
tig
Text-mode Git interface - Introduction · Tig - Text-mode interface for Git (don’t use it much after moving back to Emacs though) -
bat
nicercat
- GitHub - sharkdp/bat: A cat(1) clone with wings. -
batman
usebat
for man pages - bat-extras/batman.md at master · eth-p/bat-extras · GitHub

Maartz
I like a tool called tl;dr
.
It gives you basic knowledge of many commands.
On macOS it’s a good’ol brew install tldr
They also have a nodejs client, so it can be installed with npm.
EG:
❯ tldr grep
grep
Find patterns in files using regular expressions.
More information: <https://www.gnu.org/software/grep/manual/grep.html>.
- Search for a pattern within a file:
grep "search_pattern" path/to/file
- Search for an exact string (disables regular expressions):
grep --fixed-strings "exact_string" path/to/file
- Search for a pattern in all files recursively in a directory, showing line numbers of matches, ignoring binary files:
grep --recursive --line-number --binary-files=without-match "search_pattern" path/to/directory
- Use extended regular expressions (supports `?`, `+`, `{}`, `()` and `|`), in case-insensitive mode:
grep --extended-regexp --ignore-case "search_pattern" path/to/file
- Print 3 lines of context around, before, or after each match:
grep --context|before-context|after-context=3 "search_pattern" path/to/file
- Print file name and line number for each match:
grep --with-filename --line-number "search_pattern" path/to/file
- Search for lines matching a pattern, printing only the matched text:
grep --only-matching "search_pattern" path/to/file
- Search stdin for lines that do not match a pattern:
cat path/to/file | grep --invert-match "search_pattern"
If a command does not exist, you can add it with a PR on their repo.
It’s a community-based FOSS tool.
Saves me a ton of time in googling and reading man pages.
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