A little collection of cool unix terminal/console/curses tools

Just a list of 20 (now 28) tools for the command line. Some are little-known, some are just too useful to miss, some are pure obscure -- I hope you find something useful that you weren't aware of yet! Use your operating system's package manager to install most of them. (Thanks for the tips, everybody!)

dstat & sar iostat, vmstat, ifstat and much more in one. slurm Visualizes network interface traffic over time. vim & emacs The real programmers' editors. screen, dtach, tmux, byobu Keep your terminal sessions alive. multitail See your log files in separate windows. tpp Presentation ("PowerPoint") tool for terminal. xargs & parallel Executes tasks from input (even multithread). restic & borgbackup Encrypting backup tools. nethack & slash'em Still the most complex game on the planet. lftp Does FTPS. Can mirror, kinda like rsync. ack, ag (silver searcher), pt A better grep for source code. calcurse & remind + wyrd Calendar systems. newsbeuter & rsstail Command line RSS readers. powertop Helps conserve power on Linux. tig A console UI for git. qalc The best calculator. Ever. (For scripts too.) htop, atop & glances Process, memory and io monitoring. ttyrec & ipbt Record and play back terminal sessions. rsync Keeps filesystems in sync over SSH. mtr traceroute 2.0. socat & netpipes Directing stuff easily in and out of sockets. iftop, iptraf & nethogs To see where your traffic goes. siege & tsung Command line load test tools. ledger Terminal-based accounting package. taskwarrior Todo management in the terminal. curl Everybody's favorite HTTP toolbox. rtorrent & aria2 Command line torrent downloaders. ttytter & earthquake Nice trendy Twitter clients :) vifm & ranger Alternatives to the midnight commander. cowsay & sl I just couldn't resist. :o) cloc Counts lines of code. ipcalc For network assignments.

Discussion of this post on Hacker News - that's the place to get into nice old-school FidoNet-style flame wars about the important things in life, like whether or not tmux is better than screen , is parallel better than xargs , whether or not ifconfig is a power tool, or should this list include somebody's once-used tool for converting old Pascal code to C or something. :o)

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