Boost Your Productivity with 15 Essential Command-Line Tools
This article introduces a curated collection of powerful command-line utilities—including faster search tools, interactive Git viewers, JSON processors, shell checkers, fuzzy finders, system monitors, multi-threaded downloaders, file transfer helpers, code counters, terminal multiplexers, session recorders, and multi‑log tailers—to streamline development and operations workflows on Linux.
ag: A faster recursive search tool than grep or ack.
tig: An interactive Git project viewer that can replace many Git commands.
mycli: A MySQL client with syntax highlighting and command completion, similar to IPython, that can replace the default MySQL command.
jq: A JSON processor and pretty‑printer with syntax highlighting, usable as a replacement for python -m json.tool.
shellcheck: A static analysis tool for shell scripts that detects syntax errors and bad practices.
fzf: A fuzzy finder for the command line that enables interactive, smart searching and selection of files or content, and works perfectly with Ctrl‑R history search.
PathPicker (fpp): Automatically detects directories and files in command‑line output, provides an interactive selector, and is especially useful together with Git.
Example usage:
git diff HEAD~8 --stat | fpphtop: A more beautiful and convenient process monitor that replaces the traditional top command.
glances: A powerful alternative to htop / top that provides richer information and a web UI for remote monitoring.
Beyond command‑line monitoring, glances also offers a web service so you can view server status from a browser.
axel: A multi‑threaded download tool that can replace curl or wget.
Example usage:
axel -n 20 http://centos.ustc.edu.cn/centos/7/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1511.isosz/rz: Interactive file transfer utilities that simplify copying files across multiple jump hosts.
cloc: A code‑line counter that reports blank lines, comment lines, and language breakdowns.
tmux: A terminal multiplexer that replaces screen and nohup.
script / scriptreplay: Tools for recording and replaying terminal sessions.
# Record
script -t 2>time.txt session.typescript
# Run commands
... (your commands)
# Stop recording
exit
# Replay
scriptreplay -t time.txt session.typescriptmultitail: Allows simultaneous monitoring of multiple log files within a single terminal window.
Which of these tools have you found most useful?
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