fzf for quickly matching file names especially deep in the directory hierarchy

ripgrep for quickly searching for text content within files

dtrx for handling the right extractions of different archive types

I basically live in nvim. Being able to configure my editor in an actual programming language makes it so much more useful to me than vim could ever be.

I mentioned this in another post, but tmux is awesome

bat is a nice one

ffmpeg

alsamixer

And on a more devops front k9s https://k9scli.io/

They might have specific uses that most users might not need and there may be better alternatives but some of the ones I’ve been using are:

CISO - A command line tool for making compressed ISO files that can be used in emulators and some video game consoles running custom firmware.

RAR - The Linux version of WinRAR, which doesn’t have a UI like the Windows version does.

Flatpak - Probably well known but in case a newer Linux user sees this, it’s used to download and install flatpaks from Flathub.

argos-translate for offline machine language translation.

tmux & neovim for editing files and organizing the terminal displays.

asciinema for recording and playing back terminal sessions.

yt-dlp

I have mostly replaced all command line stuff with Emacs, but there are still a few CLI utilities that I continue to use, whether I am in the CLI directly or whether I am using Emacs:

• tmux or screen (terminal multiplexing)
• bash (shell scripting)
• grep, sed (filtering, formatting)
• ps, pgrep, pkill (process control)
• ls, find, du (filesystem search)
• ssh, nc, rsync, sshfs, sftp (remote access, file transfer)
• tee, dd (pipe control)
• less, emacs, diff, patch, pandoc (text editing)
• man, apropos (manual)
• tar, gzip, bzip2, xz (archiving)
• hexdump, base64, basenc, sha256sum (data encoding, checksums)
• wget, curl, (HTTP client)
• dpkg, apt-get, guix (package management)
• mpv (media player)
• ldd, objdump, readelf (inspecting binary files)
• zfs (maintaining my backup filesystem)

• ranger and mc - both are file managers, and their approach is so different that I choose one of them I need at the moment depending on what do I want to do (mc for traditional file management, ranger for looking around the directory tree and peeking into files)
• htop, tmux - classics
• weechat, profanity - for my IM needs
• ripgrep - for searching through files
• magic-wormhole for file and ssh public key exchange
• mosh for when the network conditions aren’t ideal
• nmap to see if that machine I’ve connected into the network is up and what IP did it get
• bat for quick looking into files
• gdb, with mandatory gdb dashboard
• nvim for serious text and code editing, micro for more casual editing

Ncdu is a really useful little utility that shows you what directories are using the most space on whichever drive/directory you select. Really useful little piece of software.

hdparm is another neato one that let’s you test the read speeds of your drives, though it’s more so something ya use once and forget exists.

Also, though Neovim is more popular, Helix deserves some recognition. It’s a rust based, vim inspired text editor which removes the need to configure it, making it easier for people trying to get into terminal text editors.

Edit: Jerboa removed the first name, my bad.

off the top of my head:

• vim
• git
• bash
• make
• whatever-compiler-im-using
• curl
• less
• grep