What are some great time savers on CLI that you would recommend?

Nvim. Yeah, I didn’t say emacs, wanna fight about it? Also, lustyjuggler for the best buffer management, and copilot.

Tmux, because it’s better than screen.

Sed/awk/cut/perl/head/tail/cat — I’m always chopping up text with these.

Bash/zsh — a healthy set of aliases and shell configuration can be a huge timesaver.

A bunch of good suggestions already in the thread so I'm just going to drop one that blew my mind when I first learned it:
Escape+. (Press escape then full stop)

This populates your command with the latest argument from the last command used. I find it extremely useful, for example:

ll /tmp/mydir
cat <hotkey>
It then becomes: cat /tmp/mydir
Then I just continue typing

zoxide - there's a bunch of similar implementations of this idea, so if you have your own favourite they're all pretty much interchangable but basically it's cd based on fuzzy fragment matching. Always navigating to some/folder/giant-microwave-dish-project? Just type z microwave and save yourself the keystrokes.

I'm surprised that people think manpages are too verbose. If anything, I find them too sparse. Then again, there is always the occasional utility that uses their manpage as the only documentation, or where it's just a copy of their whole user manual, so I kinda get it. But on the other hand, it's usually easy enough to find what you need by pressing the backslash key to search.

duf sounds really useful though; I never remember how to find out how much space is left on a storage volume, and I can never remember how to use dq.

I have an entirely unwarranted fondness of CLI email programs. mailx is basically the definitive tool for it, as the enhansed version of the original mail MUA. There are frendlier ones available like mutt or the decendants of elm like pine or alpine. True CLI heads might be using one that attaches to vim or emacs. Now that I think about it the fondness is probably stockholm syndrome. I've spent many hours using mailq to figure out why emails are not being delivered. These days I pay people to maintain mail servers.

find is an unsung hero that is massively more powerful than you'd think thanks to the -exec parameter. I find it particularly great to find the location of configuration files (I really don't get why so many software packages don't think to put that info in their documentation), or just stuff that I have forgotten where I had put them. The syntax is a little bit unintuitive but it's on pretty much every system by default.

ppp is really handy for talking to a certain breed of retro computers, and can be used to connect them to the internet.

Fzf is handy to navigate bash history, directories, etc.

Fish shell

• Basically no config
• Suggests a command from history when you start writing out of the box (ctrl-f to complete is hardwired in my brain now so I accidentally use it elsewhere)
• Oh you have history in another terminal session you want access to now? Just write history merge
• Sane ad-hoc for-loops, <enter> won't execute if you haven't closed the loop block
• abbr is what aliases should be, expands as you type so you can actually edit things before executing, and the history becomes readable. I can never switch to a shell without it again.

history

!!

ps -ef | grep x (where X is part of a process name)

hwinfo

mediainfo

lspci / lscpu / etc

du -h

df -h

which x

Some simple sanity aliases for distros that lack them:

alias ls='ls -h'
alias la='ls -lha'
alias ll='ls -lh'
alias ..='cd ..'
alias ...='cd ../..'
alias ....='cd ../../..'

And some others I like:

alias du='du -h --max-depth=1'
alias add_path='export PATH=$PWD:$PATH'

I have some neat bash (and other readline based tools) keybindings. These go in ~/.inputrc or /etc/inputrc:

"\C-[[A": history-search-backward
"\C-[[B": history-search-forward

These let you type the start of a command, then use the up and down arrows to scroll through history commands starting with that.

$if Bash
        Space: magic-space
$endif

This does history expansion when typing a space. Mostly I use this for previewing sudo !! before running it, but there's a lot of other neat stuff you can do with it.

I work with containers a bit, so these tools are biased against those.

openssl can generate random numbers without having to manually pull bits from the hardware devices, and it will likely exist even in a stripped-down container so it's my go-to tool for the one-off generation.

socat - basically netcat on steroids. Relays bidirectional traffic from whatever to wherever. Files, pipes sockets, device descriptors, you name it. Invaluable for using a local tool against a remote instance or blindly shoving traffic to some other destination. We used this to work around region-specific limitations in Google Cloud before they introduced true global access, so it's robust enough for 24/7 production use.

ansible - straightforward syntax and agentless. Not just for mass-provisioning servers, it's useful for templating out variations of config files with Jinja or reconfiguring laptops/desktops to a known state, with things like the gconf and kdeconfig modules to declaratively set settings for GNOME and KDE respectively. You can also run it imperatively, like grab hardware specs for a specific group of hosts. If you still have VMs on a cloud service, it's extremely powerful with dynamic inventory plugins.

kind - the tool used to test Kubernetes itself during its development. Spins up a vanilla Kubernetes cluster using containers instead of VMs. As it was built for CI, it is extremely quick to start and teardown and you feed it a file to declaratively configure a cluster. I use it over the others specifically because it spins up a vanilla cluster without all the trimmings.

ignition and butane - declarative, automated provisioning of immutable systems which is extremely powerful when combined with Terraform/OpenTofu. Basically halfway between a traditional VM and a container. Useful when I need to spin up a minimal single-purpose VM with CoreOS/Flatcar to run a lightweight tool, but where setting up all the infrastructure to run a container in a single VM is overkill.

cfssl - Cloudflare's PKI toolbox. I always keep forgetting openssl's syntax to generate certs that aren't PEM encoded, and cfssl's JSON syntax makes it very straightforward to crank out a full chain to test things.

pgcli and mycli - basically nicer CLIs against Postgres and MySQL/MariaDB

stern - log tailing tool for Kubernetes clusters. Pods of containers are ephemeral, suffixed with randomly-generated strings and a badly built container would likely crash and wipe all the existing logs as they're attached to that container. This handles the ephemeralness for you so can focus on "show me the logs of all containers with the name x"

ip-masq-agent - not quite an interactive CLI tool, but it saves massive amounts of hair-pulling frustrations when dealing with Kubernetes networking (both on their own are already complex enough). Basically makes it so pod traffic appears to be coming from the node IPs instead of the pod IP. It's a more intuitive concept to grasp and greatly simplifies access control across the board.

btop is another good system monitor

I prefer micro over nano (the default shortcuts are more natural)

rg (ripgrep) is great for searching for text within files

fd (fd-find) is great for searching for files by name

ranger is a good file explorer

autojump can help you navigate quickly to folders you've been to before

A big time saver for me is set -o vi in bash for modal editing with vi-like bindings. ct and caW are a joy when dealing with long commands with lots of arguments.

zsh with oh-my-zsh is great. Lot's small improvements over your basic bash.

zellij is a neat replacement for screen/tmux with saner default settings than tmux.

fd (sometimes called fd-find) is a great replacement for find with more powerful and easier to remember options.

sl - "steam locomotive" draws a silly train driving across your terminal anytime you misspelled an ls command. Never fails to bring a smile to my face.

The best thing I ever did to make cli usage easier was to start taking notes, especially when something was hard to figure out.

Everyone organizes data differently. I have my cli and bash notes in a directory in obsidian. Files are broken down by topic unless the program is self explanatory. Then I have header sections.

It took me a while to set up, but now it's really easy to find what I need. When things are ambiguous I wrote the problem in trying to solve in different ways so search will also work.

Here's an example of the headers in my bash/strings file:

• substrings
• replace
• heredocs / multiple lines
  • multi line variables
  • piping
  • write to a file
  • assign to a variable
  • suppress indentation
  • multi line comments

Nvtop and btop, for nvidia graphics cards and just general system usage monitoring respectively.

zoxide, makes directory navigation really smooth.

Starting with the basics in the .{ba,z,…}shrc – safer and more verbose basic commands

alias mv="mv -iv" # safer and verbose move
alias cp="cp -riv" # safer, recursive and verbose copy
alias mkdir='mkdir -vp' # verbose mkdir that allows to pass a path
alias ls="ls -F" # show trailing slash with folders
alias ll="ls -la" # show detailed view of all files (including hidden)

If you’re on macOS, a package manager is a must. Get Homebrew (or alternatives like MacPorts). Windows has Scoop and/or Chocolatey. Linux distros & the BSDs typically don’t tend to lack this feature by default. ;-)

If you prepend your file or directory names with a date, do it in the ISO 8601 format, and live a happy life.

mkdir "$(date -I) Birthday photos"

Next, the already mentioned

tldr

For when you’re stuck on some machine with next to nothing installed, but have a connection to the public web, there is

curl -s cheat.sh/topic

cheat.sh uses (iirc) the tl;dr repos (and some others, shown by best availability per topic), but is available effectively everywhere. Fixed installation is available optionally, if I’m not mistaken.

In addition, I run this in my shell .rc:

function cheat()
{
    curl -s cheat.sh/"$1"|bat
}

bat of course being my next recommendation. The repo description really tells it all:

A cat(1) clone with wings.

To use it everywhere in general, set it up next to your other variables:

export EDITOR=hx
export PAGER=bat

In the same vain as cheat.sh, wttr.in:

alias weather="curl -s wttr.in/$YOUR_TOWN?0"

Has some nice customization options for the response format, too: ?0 is the formatting option which means “small widget”, I use wttr.in/location?format=Weather+in+%l:+%C+with+%t,+wind+at+%w,+H=%h&lang=$lang for a neat one-liner, but the format can include \ns as well.

From the creator and maintainer of the previous two also comes qrenco.de, and yes, it works exactly the way you think it does.

Browsh is a cool project, though I’m not sure how often it is really used, in a pinch and set up on a server, it looks amazing compared to the alternatives (w3m…), very promising.

A related project is also mosh, probably best summarized as “better SSH” (mobile shell).

Bitwarden, like most password managers, has an official CLI, but there are also arguably better third-party implementations (rbw).

cb is a universal clipboard with several pasteboards and GUI integrations.

libqalculate offers a full CLI calculator, including, conveniently, currency conversion.

spotify_player – self-explanatory.

Lastly, one that’s not strictly speaking an everyday CLI tool, but I want to mention it regardless. For the whole setup and “dotfile management” topic, chezmoi can be used to relieve some of the pain that tends to come from that process.

I’m certain that the instant I press submit on this comment, I will think of half a dozen more cool/unique/quirky things, but I shall leave it at that for now.