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Bas Steins
Bas Steins

Posted on • Originally published at bas.codes

14 Awesome CLI Tools for Modern Software Developers

General Command Line Tools

Autojump

Autojump is a tool that learns your most frequented directories and allows you to switch to them by using a shortcut.

exa

exa is a modern replacement for ls with very nice outputs.

exa

pbcopy & pbpaste

You can use pbcopy and pbpaste to pipe the output of your commands to your clipboard and read from there

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | pbcopy
pbpaste > file.txt
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Documentation and Bug Fixing

tldr

tldr is a collection of cheat sheets for console commands.

tldr

howdoi

With howdoi you can browse the internet for coding snippets right from your terminal.

howdoi

rebound

rebound is a command-line tool that instantly fetches Stack Overflow results when an exception in your Python code is thrown.

Working with Files

jq

jq handles JSON on the command line.

icdiff

icdiff is a visual diffing tool for your terminal.

peco

Think of peco as a realtime grep.

ack

ack is like grep but faster and more user friendly.
ack

Databases, HTTP

httpie

httpie is like postman in your console window.

pgcli

pgcli is like DataGrip on your terminal.

Other Tools

tig

tig is a visual git client on the console.

tig

ttygif

ttygif is a tool to create animated gifs from your terminal sessions.

If you're using macOS and depending on your screen resolution, you might need to chop some pixels to remove window decorations. I did this like so.

convert tty.gif -coalesce -repage 0x0 -gravity North -chop 0x38 +repage tty.gif
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Oldest comments (2)

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svgatorapp profile image
SVGator

Lots of great resources!

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codewander profile image
codewander

I love httpie