Top 5 Terminal Utilities

Another easy post? Oh, certainly, but again, this information is important to retain.

1. ripgrep
   • You have no idea (or maybe you do?) how useful this thing is. First of all, it’s incredibly fast. I’m sure this thing could find my birth certificate before I could find my glasses that are sitting on my face.
2. helix
   • You ever want to use vim but you don’t want to do the work of setting it up? Helix to the rescue! This is basically vim, but all the vundle stuff is taken care of for you. Plus, it’s written in Rust and that’s so hot right now. I feel like we should append that Jeff Atwood quote “Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript,” with Rust as well since everyone and their mom is re-writing all of these C/C++ programs in it.
3. lsd
   • Please bear with me on the name. It’s just ls ✨deluxe✨. Basically, the ls command we all know and love, but it’s fancy and has some nice icons and colors. Just be sure to install a nerd font along with it if you’re going to use it. My favorite is Hack NF.
4. oh-my-posh
   • I like my terminals to have a bit more than just the regular ol’ $ and blinking cursor. Oh My Posh gives a simple way to customize your terminal to your liking, displaying handy dandy info and such. Here’s what mine looks like.

5. tldr
   • Remembering things is hard, and sometimes, man pages can be a bit overwhelming. That’s where tldr comes in. This community run utility has examples of all of the command line tools I’ve ever come across. It makes it really easy to get started with a new utility, and it gives a really nice, concise reminder for anything you may have forgotten.

What are some of your favorite terminal utilities? Let me know in the comments below. Thanks for reading!