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✨Be a 10X Linux User with these tools 😎💫

Shrijal Acharya on November 29, 2023

TL;DR This article lists six great tools for developers to install on their Linux machines. 🎉 Feel free to explore these tools, and sta...

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Christian Ledermann • Nov 29 '23

McFly McFly replaces your default ctrl-r shell history search with an intelligent search engine that takes into account your working directory and the context of recently executed commands. McFly's suggestions are prioritized in real time with a small neural network.
Oh My ZSH! Unleash your terminal like never before.

Dmitri Don • Nov 29 '23

Can you provide few use cases where Oh My ZSH unleashes the terminal like never before? :) I installed it, but only pressing Y to update it every time i start the terminal... Never had time to research why I really installed it, but someone recommended to get it :)

Joao L. • Nov 30 '23

There's many little things, but one of the best quality of life improvements of zsh is the vastly improved tab-completion.

Dmitri Don • Nov 30 '23

Ok, tried to press Tab twice, got selectable list of directories... ok, pretty cool, but only for one level, after selecting on directory, had to double Tab again for the next level....

Christian Ledermann • Nov 29 '23

have a look at: pythonbytes.fm/episodes/show/281/o...

Ben Sinclair • Nov 30 '23

It's important to note that if you use ngrok in your job, you need to pay for a license per-seat.

I've personally not seen the appeal of exa beyond its git integration. Everything else people talk about it doing is done by GNU grep anyway!

Shrijal Acharya • Dec 1 '23

About Exa, I use it with an alias, so I don't need to use the command exa ..., I just use ls as I used to, and it will use exa under the hood. Exa's output looks appealing and is good to work with, and the git integration is a cherry on top.

alias ls='exa -al --color=always --group-directories-first'
alias la='exa -a --color=always --group-directories-first'
alias ll='exa -l --color=always --group-directories-first'
alias lla='exa -la --color=always --group-directories-first'

Ben Sinclair • Dec 1 '23 • Edited

Those arguments are all copied from GNU ls anyway, so you could do the same thing with alias ls='ls -al --color=always --group-directories-first.
Is there a difference in the output that couldn't be configured with flags or setting environment variables like LSCOLORS, etc.?

And what's the difference between ls and lla?

Shrijal Acharya • Dec 3 '23

That's a customization specific to me. Just ignore that. I use ls and lla interchangeably sometimes. 🥴

𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️ • Nov 30 '23

One tool that has helped me enormously with keeping my mind on the right topic is atuin, which makes it a lot easier to find old commands, so instead of trying to sift through my history and losing track of my actual task, I can just fuzzy-find stuff without wasting too much thought of it.

And speaking of tasks, I've recently started using taskwarrior and timewarrior to track what needs to be done and how much time I spend on it. I even have it integrated into my zsh prompt so any active task is listed there because otherwise I'd just get distracted and leave the timer running while doing something completely unrelated.

Shrijal Acharya • Nov 30 '23 • Edited

My way of searching history was to use hs | fzf, where hs is an alias for the history command. Atuin is definitely going to come in handy. I am a WSL guy, and for now, my approach works well for me. I don't want to add too many tools to the system as it's already a bit slower.

Nicholas Drone • Nov 29 '23

The last 2 just seem to pretty up the existing commands, I probably won't use since the flags are hardcoded in my brain from years of use. Instead of Z I use autojump github.com/wting/autojump may not have all the features of Z but I'm commonly somewhere in my home directory anyway.

Shrijal Acharya • Nov 30 '23

autojump definitely seems to be a great alternative to z. z seems to be unmaintained for years. I guess it's time to switch for me as well. I am surprised they both have the same star count. 😆

Sebastian Christopher • Nov 30 '23 • Edited

If anyone is interested there is also zoxide 💿 And it looks to be active maintained, and build in Rust.

Igor Zibarev • Dec 2 '23

I second this, zoxide is just superior to z, autojump, and else.

Prayson Wilfred Daniel • Nov 30 '23

Nice 👌🏾. I found bat, cat with wings, enriching my terminal life.

Shrijal Acharya • Nov 30 '23

Such a handy tool. Added to my toolkit. Now, no more 'cat' only 'bat'. 😆

Pxlmastr • Nov 29 '23

Great post! I personally use both fd and fzf in my workflow, so glad to see that fzf is up there.

Shrijal Acharya • Nov 30 '23

fzf is a pretty handy little tool that definitely speeds up my daily workflow. It had to be mentioned! 😉

𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️ • Nov 30 '23

I only started using fzf sometime around early 2023 but it's already become a central part of how I use linux.

When I want to open a project, I just type p projectname which lists all git repos in my $HOME/workspace and lets me fuzzy-find the one I want. Then I edit a file by typing e filename which does the same but for files and opens them in nvim. I even use it to check out git branches. Great tool! 👍💖

Shrijal Acharya • Nov 30 '23

fzf is a must-have gem for any Linux user I guess. 😉

Riccardo Venturini • Dec 2 '23 • Edited

You should try this awesome alias (require bat):

alias fzf='fzf --preview "bat --color=always --style=header,grid --line-range :500 {}"'

Shrijal Acharya • Dec 3 '23

Great one! Added.

Athreya aka Maneshwar • Dec 3 '23 • Edited

I like localtunnel more, which gives you the flexibility to make your subdomain.

Shrijal Acharya • Dec 3 '23

I've never tried that before. I guess I need to give it a try. Thank you for sharing!

Nathan S.R. • Dec 2 '23

Nice List. Thanks for the thoughtful composition.

Shrijal Acharya • Dec 3 '23

Glad I could help! 🙌

Paul Isaris • Dec 2 '23

Very nice list, actually helpful tools! Thanks!

Shrijal Acharya • Dec 3 '23

🙌

Grant Carthew • Dec 1 '23

Exa was good, replaced with github.com/lsd-rs/lsd

Shrijal Acharya • Dec 3 '23

So many alternatives! 🥴 Exa, Eza, or LSD

Alex (The Engineering Bolt) ⚡ • Nov 29 '23

@shricodev what service are you using to generate these animated hero images. Love them, they look really cool!

Shrijal Acharya • Nov 29 '23

For the image I use lexica.art. It contains AI stock images and I pick one that suits the blog title. For the animation leiapix works absolutely perfectly. I hope this helps you and maybe someone who has the same question.

Jonas Scholz • Nov 29 '23

I've seen a few cover gifs like yours, how did you create it? Looks nice:)

Shrijal Acharya • Nov 30 '23

Jonas, I have mentioned the same in @alexr comment. Could you check that out? I'm glad you liked it.

Ilja Reznik • Nov 29 '23 • Edited

Exa is discontinued.
Community fork is eza
If you want to have a synched shell history you can try
atuin

Shrijal Acharya • Nov 30 '23

I have mentioned about eza in Exa. atuin seems to be a great tool. Would love to give it a try!

Buniamin Shabanov • Nov 29 '23

Oh, oh! You used convert.leiapix.com for the top image! Nice!

Shrijal Acharya • Nov 30 '23

Yes, sir! 😄

Nelson • Nov 29 '23

Good! I'll try z and exa! Thanks for sharing

Shrijal Acharya • Nov 30 '23

Glad to hear that Nelson! 😀

Ori Roza • Nov 29 '23

great article!

Shrijal Acharya • Nov 30 '23

Thank you, Ori! 😀

Geri Máté • Nov 29 '23

Awesome list! Knew it was gonna be great when I saw Ngrok mentioned first

Shrijal Acharya • Nov 29 '23 • Edited

Absolutely! Ngrok is a game-changer. How could I not mention it right? 😉 I think it's a must-have tool for easily exposing local servers and testing webhooks. What's been your standout experience with it so far?