I'm not sure many web developers can get away without visiting the command line. As for me, I've been using the command line since 1997, first at university when I felt both super cool l33t-hacker and simultaneously utterly out of my depth.
Over the years my command line habits have improved and I often search for smarter tools for the jobs I commonly do. With that said, here's my current list of improved CLI tools.
If I want to run the original command, which is sometimes I do need to do, then there's two ways I can do this (I'm on a Mac so your mileage may vary):
`cat` is used to print the contents of a file, but given more time spent in the command line, features like syntax highlighting come in very handy. I found [ccat][3] which offers highlighting then I found [bat][4] which has highlighting, paging, line numbers and git integration.
The `bat` command also allows me to search during output (only if the output is longer than the screen height) using the `/` key binding (similarly to `less` searching).
`ping` is incredibly useful, and probably my goto tool for the "oh crap is X down/does my internet work!!!". But `prettyping` ("pretty ping" not "pre typing"!) gives ping a really nice output and just makes me feel like the command line is a bit more welcoming.
The `fzf` tool is a **huge** enhancement on `ctrl+r`. It's a fuzzy search against the terminal history, with a fully interactive preview of the possible matches.
`top` is my goto tool for quickly diagnosing why the CPU on the machine is running hard or my fan is whirring. I also use these tools in production. Annoyingly (to me!) `top` on the Mac is vastly different (and inferior IMHO) to `top` on linux.
However, `htop` is an improvement on both regular `top` and crappy-mac `top`. Lots of colour coding, keyboard bindings and different views which have helped me in the past to understand which processes belong to which.
There is a weird bug in Mac Sierra that can be overcome by running `htop` as root (I can't remember exactly what the bug is, but this alias fixes it - though annoying that I have to enter my password every now and again):
I'm pretty sure I picked this one up from Paul Irish some years ago. Although I rarely fire up `diff` manually, my git commands use diff all the time. `diff-so-fancy` gives me both colour coding but also character highlight of changes.
Although I use a Mac, I've never been a fan of Spotlight (I found it sluggish, hard to remember the keywords, the database update would hammer my CPU and generally useless!). I use [Alfred][14] a lot, but even the finder feature doesn't serve me well.
I tend to turn the command line to find files, but `find` is always a bit of a pain to remember the right expression to find what I want (and indeed the Mac flavour is slightly different non-mac find which adds to frustration).
`fd` is a great replacement (by the same individual who wrote `bat`). It is very fast and the common use cases I need to search with are simple to remember.
Knowing where disk space is being taking up is a fairly important task for me. I've used the Mac app [Disk Daisy][17] but I find that it can be a little slow to actually yield results.
The `du -sh` command is what I'll use in the terminal (`-sh` means summary and human readable), but often I'll want to dig into the directories taking up the space.
`ncdu` is a nice alternative. It offers an interactive interface and allows for quickly scanning which folders or files are responsible for taking up space and it's very quick to navigate. (Though any time I want to scan my entire home directory, it's going to take a long time, regardless of the tool - my directory is about 550gb).
Once I've found a directory I want to manage (to delete, move or compress files), I'll use the cmd + click the pathname at the top of the screen in [iTerm2][18] to launch finder to that directory.
There's another [alternative called nnn][20] which offers a slightly nicer interface and although it does file sizes and usage by default, it's actually a fully fledged file manager.
It's amazing that nearly every single command line tool comes with a manual via `man <command>`, but navigating the `man` output can be sometimes a little confusing, plus it can be daunting given all the technical information that's included in the manual output.
This is where the TL;DR project comes in. It's a community driven documentation system that's available from the command line. So far in my own usage, I've not come across a command that's not been documented, but you can [also contribute too][22].
I personally flitter between `ack` and `ag` without really remembering which I prefer (that's to say they're both very good and very similar!). I tend to default to `ack` only because it rolls of my fingers a little easier. Plus, `ack` comes with the mega `ack --bar` argument (I'll let you experiment)!
Both `ack` and `ag` will (by default) use a regular expression to search, and extremely pertinent to my work, I can specify the file types to search within using flags like `--js` or `--html` (though here `ag` includes more files in the js filter than `ack`).
I'm a massive fanboy of [jq][29]. At first I struggled with the syntax, but I've since come around to the query language and use `jq` on a near daily basis (whereas before I'd either drop into node, use grep or use a tool called [json][30] which is very basic in comparison).
I've even started the process of writing a jq tutorial series (2,500 words and counting) and have published a [web tool][31] and a native mac app (yet to be released).
`jq` allows me to pass in JSON and transform the source very easily so that the JSON result fits my requirements. One such example allows me to update all my node dependencies in one command (broken into multiple lines for readability):
The above command will list all the node dependencies that are out of date, and use npm's JSON output format, then transform the source JSON from this:
```
{
"node-jq": {
"current": "0.7.0",
"wanted": "0.7.0",
"latest": "1.2.0",
"location": "node_modules/node-jq"
},
"uuid": {
"current": "3.1.0",
"wanted": "3.2.1",
"latest": "3.2.1",
"location": "node_modules/uuid"
}
}
```
…to this:
That result is then fed into the `npm install` command and voilà, I'm all upgraded (using the sledgehammer approach).
Some of the other tools that I've started poking around with, but haven't used too often (with the exception of ponysay, which appears when I start a new terminal session!):
