McFly is a tiny utility that replaces the functionality offered by Bash’s ctrl-r with an intelligent search engine.
Read more
Category: Utilities
Excellent Utilities: fkill – kill processes quick and easy
One thing a newcomer to Linux learns quickly is that they’re never limited to a single way of performing a task. And killing processes is no exception. In this article, we’ll look at an alternative to kill. It’s called fkill. It’s billed as offering a quicker and easier way to terminating processes.
Read more
Crow Translate – free desktop translation software
Crow Translate bills itself as a cross-platform, lightweight, translator supporting 117 different languages.
Read more
Best Linux Multi-Core Compression Tools
This article surveys compression software that makes full use of multi-core processors when compressing files. Many of the tools also offer decompression speedups too.
Read more
Essential System Tools: fdupes – find or delete duplicate files
fdupes finds duplicate files in the given set of directories and sub-directories. It recognizes duplicates by comparing MD5 signature of files followed by a byte-to-byte comparison. The utility offers a lot of options to list, delete and replace files.
Read more
Essential System Tools: inxi – CLI system information tool
This is the fifth in our series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities. inxi is a Perl script that interrogates your system.
Read more
Essential System Tools: pet – command-line snippet manager
This is the third in our series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities. pet is a simple command-line snippet manager. The software is written in the Go programming language.
Read more
Essential System Tools: gtop – System monitoring dashboard for the terminal
This is the second in our series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities. gtop is an open source system monitoring utility written in JavaScript.
Read more
Essential System Tools: ps_mem – accurately report memory usage of programs
This is the first in a series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series will examine both graphical and text based open source utilities. The first tool under the spotlight is ps_mem, a small utility that reliably reports how much memory is consumed by an application.
Read more
calcurse – free calendar and scheduling application for the command line
calcurse is an open source, text-based calendar and scheduling application. The software keeps track of events, appointments and everyday tasks. The software is lightweight, fast and reliable. It’s designed for the console or terminal, locally or on a remote machine.
Read more
Survey: Console Based Linux File Managers
In the field of system administration, Linux has bags of graphical file managers. However, some users prefer managing files from the shell, finding it the quickest way to navigate the file system and perform file operations. This is, in part, because console based file managers are more keyboard friendly, enabling users to perform file operations without using a mouse, and make it quicker to navigate the filesystem and issue commands in the console at the same time.
Read more
8 Lesser Known Yet Awesome Text Editors
Irrespective of the operating system used, the text editor is one of those quintessential applications for many users. A text editor is software used for editing plain text files. Text editors are used to write programming code, change configuration files, take notes, and more. For this feature, we wanted to select alternative text editors which are definitely worth trying but may have been missed given that they receive less coverage in Linux publications, and are not included or installed by default in many Linux distributions.
Read more
bat – super charged cat – my favorite colorizer
bat is a drop-in replacement for the cat command adding advanced syntax highlighting and Git integration to show file modifications. It’s a really useful utility that is a massive leap up from cat. bat’s written in the Rust programming language.
Read more
googler: Google Web and Google News from the command-line
I love working with the command line. Seriously, I think there’s hardly anything more productive and versatile for a software developer than the terminal. Maybe it’s the hacker in me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a heavy user of graphical applications, but the terminal will always have a special place.
I’ve recently come across a command-line tool that’s right up my street. It’s called googler, an open source tool to Google from the command-line. It’s written in Python, so that ticks another box for me. googler isn’t affiliated to Google in any way.
Read more
youtube-dl: Download Video and Audio Files From Streaming Sites
youtube-dl is a cross-platform, open source, command-line program to download videos. Its name belies the fact it supports tons of streaming sites besides YouTube. I’d never heard of half of them.
The software is written in the Python programming language and needs the Python interpreter (2.6, 2.7, or 3.2+).
Read more
Handy Disk Image Tools
There are a number of different ways of mounting an ISO image under Linux. The venerable mount command offers an easy solution. But if you need tools that offer more functionality for working with disk images, try some of the following excellent open source tools.
Read more
Keep a Watchful Eye with these Console Based Process Viewers
Do you need to monitor your systems, but top doesn’t provide enough information. Check out these feature-laden top alternatives.
Read more
DAR – disk archive software
Disk ARchive (DAR) is a full featured archiver with support for differential backups, slices, compression, ATTR/ACL support.
Read more
5 Top Console Linux File Managers
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 5 high quality console based free file managers. Hopefully, there will be something of interest for anyone who wishes to revel in the power of the command-line.
Read more
Command-line FTP Clients
The desktop environment with its bundle of programs sharing a common graphical user interface (GUI) remains a firm favorite with users. Not surprising really given that a good desktop environment makes computing fun and simple. The graphical desktop environment has become so ingrained in almost everyone’s computer activities that it might seem the command line will wither away. Yet, there is still an important role to play for the humble command-line interface (CLI).
Read more