Terminal Tools

I use a lot of utilities within my terminal for day to day activities.

Using this quick script, I figured out what my most used commands were.

cat ~/.zsh_history | cut -d";" -f2 | cut -d" " -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -r | head

and yeah I don't know how to use awk :(

So here they are

1901 ls 1002 vim 807 cd 675 git 276 exit 229 ssh 167 python 144 docker-compose 117 docker 77 taskell

Vim (Text Editing)

I use vim for text editing. My vimrc can be found alongside my dotfiles. A number of helpful plugins I've found for text editing include.

  • Ale (syntax highlighting)
  • Vim Surround (editing surrounding elements)
  • Emmet (html zen)
  • Coc.vim (language server protocol)
  • Ctrl-P (fuzzy finding files)
  • MuComplete (0 dependency tab completion)

Taskell (Todo List)

I use taskell as my daily todo driver. It has full vim bindings and saves to standard markdown files. Essentially all I could ask for out of a todo list.

Bat (cat replacement)

This is basically a cat replacement except it has fancy syntax highlighting, and line numbering, and everything else. It even has a --plain option to render as standard text.

Back when I was compiling the linux kernel, and making small modifications, I could quickly search the entire repo in seconds using ripgrep. It's burntsushi's handcoded optimized rust utility which allows for insanely fast searches. It's actually rather impressive.

Docker (container everything)

Containerizing all my apps is a development philosophy and necessity. I can't develop in this polyglot world without having some way of uniformly maintaining a development environment and everything. This way I can easily share my projects, deploy them (look into export DOCKER_HOST), and work on teams without losing a step. It also makes it very clear how my applicaiton is structured.

TLDR (easier manpages)

When I don't know how to use a command, the TLDR command comes in super handy, and brings up a bunch of examples. It's the only reason I was able to write the bash script at the beginning of this page.