This is a new series highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We’re covering a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides. There’s a complete list of the tools in this series in the Summary section.
The Command Line Interface (CLI) is a way of interacting with your computer. And if you ever want to harness all the power of Linux, it’s highly recommended to master it. It’s true the CLI is often perceived as a barrier for users migrating to Linux, particularly if they’re grown up using GUI software exclusively. While Linux rarely forces anyone to use the CLI, some tasks are better suited to this method of interaction, offering inducements like superior scripting opportunities, remote access, and being far more frugal with a computer’s resources.
For anyone spending time at the CLI, they’ll rely on the shell prompt. My favorite shell is Bash. By default, the configuration for Bash on popular distributions identifies the user name, hostname, and the current working directory. All essential information. But with Liquid Prompt you can display additional information such as battery status, CPU temperature, and much more.
Installation
I’m not going to dwell on this section, mainly because the project’s website succinctly explains the process. And most popular distros offer Liquid Prompt in their software repositories.
The project requires no major dependencies, relying on common Linux utilities such as grep, ps, awk and others. But if you want to compile the software, you need to clone the project’s repository with the command:
$ git clone https://github.com/nojhan/liquidprompt.git
You can initiate the utility with:
$ source liquidprompt/liquidprompt
If you want to use it on a regular basis, add the lines below to ~/.bashrc (if you’re running the Bash shell) or ~/.zshrc (if you use zsh):
# Only load Liquid Prompt in interactive shells, not from a script or from scp
[[ $- = *i* ]] && source ~/liquidprompt/liquidprompt
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Excellent Utilities | |
|---|---|
| tmux | A terminal multiplexer that offers a massive boost to your workflow |
| lnav | Advanced log file viewer for the small-scale; great for troubleshooting |
| Paperwork | Designed to simplify the management of your paperwork |
| Abricotine | Markdown editor with inline preview functionality |
| mdless | Formatted and highlighted view of Markdown files |
| fkill | Kill processes quick and easy |
| Tusk | An unofficial Evernote client with bags of potential |
| Ulauncher | Sublime application launcher |
| McFly | Navigate through your bash shell history |
| LanguageTool | Style and grammar checker for 30+ languages |
| peco | Simple interactive filtering tool that's remarkably useful |
| Liquid Prompt | Adaptive prompt for Bash & Zsh |
| Ananicy | Shell daemon created to manage processes’ IO and CPU priorities |
| cheat.sh | Community driven unified cheat sheet |
| ripgrep | Recursively search directories for a regex pattern |
| exa | A turbo-charged alternative to the venerable ls command |
| OCRmyPDF | Add OCR text layer to scanned PDFs |
| Watson | Track the time spent on projects |
| fontpreview | Quickly search and preview fonts |
| fd | Wonderful alternative to the venerable find |