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Command Line Tools

Overview​

This is a list of recommended tools used at Truss to enhance productivity and developer happiness.

You may also be interested in these other pages from the Truss Engineering Playbook:

Terminal Emulators​

Resources​

iTerm2​

Configuration​
  • itermocil - Create pre-defined window/pane layouts and run commands in iTerm

Shells​

Resources​

zsh​

Frameworks​

fish​

Frameworks​
Configuration​
  • chruby-fish - Thin wrapper around chruby to make it work with the Fish shell

File compression and archiving​

  • unar Universal unarchiver
  • zstd Ridonkulously fast (de)compression algorithm

git tools​

  • tig ncurses interface for git
  • github-cli A git helper for GitHub specific operations from the command-line

Colorizers​

  • grc Generic colorizer. For example: alias ping='\grc --stdout --stderr --colour=on ping'
  • diff-so-fancy Prettier colored diffs in git.
  • diffr Another colordiff alternative. For example: git diff | diffr
  • tmux Terminal multiplexer with client-server architecture. Can easily recover lost shell sessions with tpm, tmux-resurrect and (optionally) tmux-continuum
  • ranger An ncurses file manager with vim-like bindings
  • exa An ls replacement with git integrations. For example: alias ll='exa --long --header --git --links --group-directories-first --color-scale --time-style=long-iso'

Database access​

  • pgcli - CLI for Postgres with auto-completion and syntax highlighting.

Data Manipulation​

JSON​

Document format conversion​

  • dos2unix Efficient conversion of line terminators between DOS and Unix format, and back
  • pandoc Swiss-Army Knife of rich text document format conversion

Plain text search tools​

  • ripgrep Stronger, faster, better grep.

macOS system administration​

  • mas Control the Mac App Store from the command line

Remote host administration​

  • keychain User-friendly front-end to ssh-agent
  • mosh Mobile-friendly ssh replacement that performs better on unreliable network connections.
  • 1Password CLI 1Password v8 supports ssh

HTTP clients​

Terminal recording/sharing​

  • asciinema - record and share Terminal sessions as text that you can copy and paste.

Learning/Debugging/Looking Things Up​

  • howdoi - instant coding answers via the command line
  • tldr - simplifies man with practical examples

*nix tools​

  • cal - quick monthly calendar view for the command line