Hi !
This week I will take a little look into three command line tools which I find very nice for daily use on a server where we have almost no interface except the command line.
The first tool I would like to bring to your attention is a file explorer for the command line.
Ranger
Ranger is a finder/explorer/nemo/nautilus replacement for the command line with a simple but straight forward file management approach. It uses the almost everywhere liked miller columns and i personally like it more than the midnight commander but that is a personal preference.
I also like the extensibility as an example you can extend ranger with poppler for pdf support or mutool whatever is available for your distro.
It can be easily installed and can be just started from it’s own directory so no big installation fuzz. Simply unpack and start ranger.
The Ranger hides in plain sight at the following link:
ranger
The next tool I want to make you aware of is a little but nifty tool which makes progress visible.
Progress
Most command line tools today still don’t show a proper progress-bar of their activities like dd or cp as an example.
Here comes progress in play as it watches in the background for cp, mv, dd, tar, gzip/gunzip, cat, etc. commands an shows their progress.
No More Pipeview or pv as many know it.
It is very convenient and doesn’t require much attention. Start it in an separate tmux instance and start your big copy transaction and keep an watchful eye on the progress bar in the tmux screen.
It relies an as some software these days on ncurses so it is for some persons a no-go but i find it more useful than jumping through hoops to use pv or watch the runtime with htop of the copy process.
Where it can be found:
progress
Now I hope to bring a little relief to most of the command line users with:
fzf
So what is fzf – it simply describes itself as general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder.
But what the heck does that mean ?
I simply see it as what it is a very nice filter for the command line which is interactive a lot of people use regex to find files on a machine fzf can be used to find anything on a machine.
It is Unix filter for command-line that can be used with any list; files, command history, processes, host names, bookmarks, git commits, etc.
It is relatively hard to describe it without seeing what it can do and the github page also scratches at the surface of things.
So I made a small asciinema cast so you can actually see if it fits your needs.
Also I recommend to give it a try because it really integrates well with and a lot of other tools and in the end you won’t miss it.
You can find it right here:
fzf
Hope you enjoyed those little tips ..
Best
David
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