Which Linux command or utility is simple, powerful, and surprisingly unknown to many people or used less often?

This could be a command or a piece of software or an application.

For example I’m surprised to find that many people are unaware of Caddy, a very simple web server that can make setting up a reverse proxy incredibly easy.

Another example is fzf. Many people overlook this, a fast command-line fuzzy finder. It’s versatile for searching files, directories, or even shell history with minimal effort.

  • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    28·
    4 days ago

    Not powerful, but often useful, column -t aligns columns in all lines. EG

    $ echo {a,bb,ccc}{5,10,9999,888} | xargs -n3
a5 a10 a9999
a888 bb5 bb10
bb9999 bb888 ccc5
ccc10 ccc9999 ccc888
$ echo {a,bb,ccc}{5,10,9999,888} | xargs -n3 | column -t
a5      a10      a9999
a888    bb5      bb10
bb9999  bb888    ccc5
ccc10   ccc9999  ccc888
  • Count Regal Inkwell@pawb.social
    12·
    4 days ago

    batcat

    It’s like cat but better. Great for when you just want to look at the contents of a file, without loading a whole text editor.

    Oh also, tldr

    My procedure for learning how to use a cli command goes tldr page -> --help if the tldr fails to help me -> THEN the full manpage

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      62·
      5 days ago

      Gripes:

      • starship and all these shell frameworks are overbloated. Just write your own prompt command and be done with it.

      • restic, ongoing issue with the author to allow people to backup without a password. Seems like a no-brainer but he’s being difficult

      • Shimitar@feddit.it
        31·
        4 days ago

        Why would you want password less backups?

        I understand if the reason is ‘just because’, but seriously, why? I just write down the password in a text file for restic --password and I am done.

        • tetris11@lemmy.ml
          6·
          4 days ago

          write down the password where though, somewhere I can guarantee it will always be there 10 years from now? That’s a big ask of me

          • jbrains@sh.itjust.works
            3·
            4 days ago

            I keep mine in Bitwarden, I export that data every 3 months and store it in a Backblaze backup, I have it written on a piece of paper stored in a locked fire box in my house, and that paper scanned in my phone.

            I can’t imagine not having at least one of those in 10 years and I can’t imagine all four failing in the same week.

            Does that give you any helpful ideas that would work for you?

            • tetris11@lemmy.ml
              2·
              4 days ago

              None that I can see persisting, as I move around a lot and my backups tend to get boxed up for periods of time before being unboxed. But, I appreciate the effort

          • Shimitar@feddit.it
            3·
            4 days ago

            That is true for lots of things.

            Moreover I use one easy “default” password for all basic stuff, and its always the same known to my spouse and written down on paper.

            At least my offsite backups are protected from prying eyes. Maybe uneeded for local backups, but doesn’t hurt to have.

          • Shimitar@feddit.it
            31·
            4 days ago

            10 years? Boy you are joung :)

            I have encrypted files from w 20 years ago, and unencrypted files from 30 years ago.

            And digitized stuff from analogic of 40 and 50 years ago.

  • ElCanut@jlai.lu
    113·
    10 hours ago

    Underrated

    Both linked projects have over 60k+ stars on GitHub

    Pick one

  • Static_Rocket@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    5 days ago

    +1 to caddy. There are some services that set safe headers following the recommendations outlined by Mozilla but others don’t control headers as strictly. Caddy is the only web server that I found that supports loose default header values. These values will be selected unless the upstream application specifies their own values.

    You can do something similar in nginx but it requires playing with maps and has a little more indirection than I’d like.

    Just wish caddy was capable of starting as root and stepping down permissions like Nginx. I have certs being managed by other tools and have to make sure they are installed and chowned for caddy’s use when they are cycled.

    • tensor_nightly69@lemmy.world
      3·
      5 days ago

      I just started the process of switching from nginx Proxy Manager to Caddy yesterday, and even before setting up a single rule, I’m enjoying it more than NPM. Really wish I would have heard about it sooner!

      • themadcodger@kbin.earth
        1·
        5 days ago

        I’m currently using NPM and don’t have any problems with it for at least my use case. Is there something I’m missing out on never having tried Caddy, or is it one of those no need to switch if there’s Nothing bugging you situations? That last bit is how I feel about Bazzite on the Steam Deck when people ask of they should switch.

  • Jumuta@sh.itjust.works
    1002·
    5 days ago

    I think a lot of people don’t realise that yt-dlp works for many sites, not just YouTube

    I used it recently for watching a video from tiktok without having to use their god awful web UI and it was amazing

    • Jumuta@sh.itjust.works
      26·
      5 days ago

      I heard about helix from you and I’ve used it for a year and a half or so now, it’s by far the best editor I’ve used so far and I can definitely vouch for it

    • Trent@lemmy.mlEnglish
      17·
      5 days ago

      Just commenting to give more love to helix. It’s my favorite “small quick edits” editor.

    • ObsidianZed@lemmy.world
      8·
      5 days ago

      I’ve actually been testing with fish recently coming from zsh, though I might wait until 4.0 fully releases before I make a more conclusive decision to move or not.

      With that said, I remember looking through omf themes and stumbled onto Starship that branched off one of the themes and really liked the concept.

      • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
        1·
        4 days ago

        It does have clojure lsp support, but you’ll probably have to use a command line for most repls.

        • SFloss (they/them)@lemmy.ml
          2·
          4 days ago

          Yeah the clojure lsp support is top notch, but there being no support for “jacking in” to a repl is the big thing keeping me from using helix full time. There’s a way of doing it if you use kitty, but it’s pretty janky.

      • jennraeross@lemmy.world
        8·
        5 days ago

        Helix is a terminal based text editor. It’s much like vim / neovim, but unlike those editors it’s good to go right out of the box, no configuration or plugins needed to make it work well.

        Topgrade is one I haven’t used, but it looks like its intended purpose is to let you upgrade your apps with one command, even if you use multiple different package managers (I.e. if you were on Ubuntu, you could use it to upgrade your apt packages, at the same time as your snap packages, as well as flatpak, nix, and homebrew if you’ve added those.)

      • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
        5·
        5 days ago

        Fish is a replacement of bash that’s a bit more user friendly (has some cool auto completion features out of the box and more sane behaviour like handling of spaces when expanding variables). I personally started to use nutshell recently but unlike fish it’s very different from bash.

        Starship is a “prompt” for various shells (that bit of text in terminal before you enter the command that shows current user and directory in bash). I haven’t used it but AFAIK it has many features like showing current time, integration with git, etc.

        • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
          9·
          5 days ago

          Yep, here’s my Starship prompt, for example:

          So, I have it configured to show:

          • the exit code of the last command (if it’s non-zero),
          • the duration of the last command (if it’s longer than 2 seconds),
          • the time (when the last command ended),
          • the current directory,
          • the current Git branch, and it also shows some Git status information, for example the $ means I have something stashed,
          • and finally the technology in use in a repository/directory, so in this case that repo uses Rust and the compiler version is 1.83.
            • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
              6·
              5 days ago

              Oh, when you’re coding something in a Git repo and you realize that you need to make a different change before you continue coding (e.g. switch to a branch, pull newest changes, or just create a separate smaller commit for part of your change), then you can run git stash push to put away your current changes, then make your other change, and then run git stash pop to bring your ongoing changes back. I recommend reading git stash --help, if you want to use it.

              Sometimes, though, you might end up just taking it into a different direction altogether or simply forget that you had something stashed. That’s when that indicator comes in handy. Because while you can have multiple things stashed, I do find it’s best not to keep them around for too long. If you do want to keep them for longer, then you can always create a branch and commit it as WIP onto there, so that you can push it onto a remote repo.

            • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
              3·
              4 days ago

              Nope, I’m glad to share.

              I personalized it from the “Gruvbox Rainbow” preset from here: https://starship.rs/presets/
              So, you might prefer that, if you’re not, well, me.

              You will need to set up a NerdFont, like the Starship installation guide says.

              Here’s my configuration:

              Spoiler 
              "$schema" = 'https://starship.rs/config-schema.json'

format = """
[$status](bg:color_red fg:color_fg0)\
[](fg:color_red bg:color_orange)\
[$cmd_duration](bg:color_orange fg:color_fg0)\
[](fg:color_orange bg:color_yellow)\
[$time](bg:color_yellow fg:color_fg0)\
[](fg:color_yellow)\
$line_break\
[$directory](bg:color_aqua fg:color_fg0)\
[](fg:color_aqua bg:color_blue)\
[$git_branch\
$git_status](bg:color_blue fg:color_fg0)\
[](fg:color_blue bg:color_bg3)\
[$c\
$rust\
$golang\
$nodejs\
$php\
$java\
$kotlin\
$haskell\
$python\
$docker_context](bg:color_bg3 fg:color_fg0)\
[](fg:color_bg3)\
$line_break\
$line_break"""

palette = 'gruvbox_dark'

[palettes.gruvbox_dark]
color_fg0 = '#ffffff'
color_bg1 = '#3c3836'
color_bg3 = '#665c54'
color_blue = '#458588'
color_aqua = '#689d6a'
color_green = '#98971a'
color_orange = '#d65d0e'
color_purple = '#b16286'
color_red = '#cc241d'
color_yellow = '#d79921'

[status]
disabled = false
symbol = ""
format = ' $symbol $status '

[username]
format = ' $user '

[directory]
format = " $path "
truncation_length = 3
truncation_symbol = "…/"

[directory.substitutions]
"Documents" = "󰈙 "
"Downloads" = " "
"Music" = "󰝚 "
"Pictures" = " "
"Projects" = "󰲋 "

[git_branch]
symbol = ""
format = ' $symbol $branch '

[git_status]
style = "bg:color_aqua"
format = '$all_status$ahead_behind '

[nodejs]
symbol = ""
format = ' $symbol $version '

[c]
symbol = " "
format = ' $symbol $version '

[rust]
symbol = ""
format = ' $symbol $version '

[golang]
symbol = ""
format = ' $symbol $version '

[php]
symbol = ""
format = ' $symbol $version '

[java]
symbol = " "
format = ' $symbol $version '

[kotlin]
symbol = ""
format = ' $symbol $version '

[haskell]
symbol = ""
format = ' $symbol $version '

[python]
symbol = ""
format = ' $symbol $version '

[cmd_duration]
format = ' 󱦟 $duration '

[time]
disabled = false
time_format = "%R"
format = '  $time '

[line_break]
disabled = false
    • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
      181·
      5 days ago

      I use it occasionally but every time I need to do something a tiny bit more complex than “extract field from an object” I have to spend half an hour studying its manual, at which point it’s faster to just write a Python script doing exactly what I need it to do.

        • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
          2·
          4 days ago

          I actually installed it recently out of curiosity, but I’m hesitant about learning its advanced features like that. At least jq is a standalone tool that’s more ubiquitous than nushell, so you can rely on it even in environments that you don’t fully control (e.g. CI like GitHub Actions). And if you use it in some public code/scripts then other people will be more familiar with it too.

  • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.worldEnglish
    40·
    5 days ago

    I’m a big fan of screen because it will let me run long-running processes without having to stay connected via SSH, and will log all the output.

    I do a lot of work on customers’ servers and having a full record of everything that happened is incredibly valuable for CYA purposes.

    • gkaklas@lemmy.zipEnglish
      15·
      5 days ago

      There is also zellij, which can do the same but also has modern functionality specific for development workspaces!

      (Although screen or tmux will still probably be more widely available on remote machines etc)

    • Static_Rocket@lemmy.worldEnglish
      151·
      5 days ago

      I’d recommend tmux for that particular use. Screen has a lot of extras that are interesting but don’t really follow the GNU mentality of “do one thing and do it well.”

      • kitnaht@lemmy.world
        11·
        5 days ago

        Tmux / Screen is like the emacs/vim of the modern day Linux I think.

        Screen is more than capable, but for those who have moved to Tmux, they will absolutely advocate for it.

      • darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        4·
        5 days ago

        When tmux was first released I was already so used to screen that I never really considered switching. What would some convincing arguments be for me to make the effort to switch now?

        • notabot@lemm.ee
          6·
          5 days ago

          The thing that got me to switch was being able to maintain my pane layout between connections. The various window and pane management niceties (naming, swapping, listing and the like) got me to stay. Now you can keep your screen, but you’d have to pry tmux from my cold, dead, tty.

        • Static_Rocket@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          5 days ago

          Tmux was purpose built for terminal multiplexing. You can assign session names for organizing and manipulating multiple instances. Send keys to and read output from detached sessions. It’s easy to script.

            • Static_Rocket@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              4 days ago

              Sorry, it was, just not for exploring all of those instances at once. Should have called out the tiling function. Screen also built in a serial terminal emulator and started playing with a few other things.

        • kablammy@sh.itjust.works
          11·
          3 days ago

          This was a few years ago so maybe it has improved, but I found that screen would crash and lose my session history and layout too often. That was bad enough, but when it happened it had some bullshit error message about a dungeon roof falling in. I don’t mind some comedy in code or even the interface, but don’t make light of the user losing their stuff. I tried tmux and it is much more stable than screen was.

    • surfrock66@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      5 days ago

      I know everyone likes tmux but screen is phenomenal. I have a .screenrc I deploy everywhere with a statusbar at the bottom, a set number of pre-defined tabs, and logging to a directory (which is cleaned up after 30 days) so I can go back and figure out what I did. Great tool.

    • villainy@lemmy.world
      7·
      5 days ago

      Woah screen is seeing active development again? There was like a decade where it stagnated. So much so that different distros were packaging different custom feature patches (IIRC only Ubuntu had a vertical split patch by default?) Looking at it now, the new screen maintainers had to skip a version to not conflict with forks that had become popular.

      When tmux stabilized I jumped ship immediately and never looked back.

      • pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online
        3·
        5 days ago

        I’ve had nohup fail to keep things running after my session ended quite frequently. It’s like it just goes to the next step in the process then gives up.

        • notabot@lemm.ee
          3·
          5 days ago

          It’s likely that you’re using a systemd based system and the admin hasn’t enabled linger for your user.

          • pearsaltchocolatebar@discuss.online
            1·
            5 days ago

            The servers are very locked down, so I’m sure that’s part of our compliance requirements. I haven’t looked into fixing it because I just wrote a script to hit Enter every 10 minutes to keep it alive.

            • notabot@lemm.ee
              2·
              5 days ago

              Ha! Faking key presses, truly an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. If it works, it works.

      • pivot_root@lemmy.world
        2·
        5 days ago

        It’s not as useful, sadly. Nohup disconnects standard input, output, and error. With screen or tmux, you can reattach them later.

  • jaxiiruff@lemmy.zip
    413·
    5 days ago

    nano was and still is vital to me learning and using linux, I will not learn how to use vim so if the distro forces it to be default im not using it.

    Why is editing text so convoluted for seemingly no reason… also hate that vim must be used for certain files.

    • TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org
      197·
      5 days ago

      It’s for people to memorize hundreds of arcane shortcuts and shit so they can feel like a smug hacker and gloat over the rest of us using other editors and getting just as much done as they are.

      Also for graybeards that haven’t realized it’s not 1985 anymore.

      • Dran@lemmy.world
        291·
        5 days ago

        For the average user you’re definitely right, but I will say for the sysadmin of headless systems, having a powerful cli editor is a godsend. While it may seem arcane and unnecessary, learning vim is easier than managing remote x or sshfs or copying files to and from a system.

        I didn’t learn vim to be a contrarian; I learned it because it seemed (and still seems to be) the path of least resistance for many workflows.

      • Karmmah@lemmy.world
        8·
        5 days ago

        It’s for people that don’t want a big bulky IDE and are willing to put a little work in to get used to it. I do all my coding in the terminal with vim and tmux and I like the simplicity and that with two dotfiles I can migrate my whole development environment to whatever PC, server or RaspberryPi that I need.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        5·
        5 days ago

        I’ve used Vim for some pretty non-nerdy stuff. Like ripping my DVD collection, when I got to the TV section I had a lot of file names to modify in bulk, and Vim let me do that. Also guitar tablature, the ability to edit plaintext both horizontally and vertically is surprisingly handy. Just having a macro to be able to add a bar line saves a shocking amount of time.

      • zagaberoo@beehaw.org
        1·
        4 days ago

        Wow, who hurt you? Vim is fun, and just because you can make things work without it doesn’t mean it has no practical benefit. It’s nice to have an editor as powerful as an IDE that doesn’t require a graphical environment.

        Hundreds of shortcuts is emacs, by the way. A major perk of modal editing and the vi editing language is that you can compose relatively few operations to accomplish many tasks rather than memorizing lots of more complex and specific shortcuts.

      • jaxiiruff@lemmy.zip
        8·
        5 days ago

        one of my favorite linux youtubers is named vimjoyer so maybe one day I will try to learn it

        • bishbosh@lemm.eeEnglish
          4·
          5 days ago

          I’ve liked helix a bit more. It takes less initial set up, and generally has the mentality of showing what you’re about to change before inputting a change command.

        • Kornblumenratte@feddit.org
          2·
          3 days ago

          It’s totally worth it. But be aware that you might get some :w sprinkled over your documents you are forced to write in other editors or word processors which does not speak vim…

        • Caveman@lemmy.world
          2·
          5 days ago

          I use vim mode everywhere I can and vim in the console, it took a bit of effort to learn but it was fun and satisfying. Highly recommend, I’m a vim user now for 7 years.

    • N0x0n@lemmy.ml
      10·
      5 days ago

      Wow you triggered a lot of vim users !

      Maybe give micro a shot :) It’s nano but more sane defaults and comes with customization in mind.

    • jayandp@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      5 days ago

      Yeah, to this day vim still isn’t intuitive for me, so I just use nano as it’s either often included or simple to install on most Distros.

      Unless a script is hardcoded for vim I haven’t had to use it.

      • lordnikon@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        5 days ago

        It’s weird but VIM is so powerful and I love it but i also agree it wouldn’t be the default just an option if you needed it. It’s like with notepad ++ on windows it’s wonderful but not everyone needs it from day one notepad will work just fine for basic typing.

      • jaxiiruff@lemmy.zip
        31·
        5 days ago

        Cant remember exactly but it had something to do with a file relating to sudo and it only was allowed to be edited with a vim style editor.

        • hersh@literature.cafe
          8·
          5 days ago

          There’s a separate command called visudo for this purpose.

          You CAN use any ol’ text editor but visudo has built-in validation specific to the sudoers file. This is helpful because sudoers syntax is unique and arcane, and errors are potentially quite harmful.

          • azuth@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            11·
            5 days ago

            But visudo can use any editor if you set SUDO_EDITOR or EDITOR variables. If you don’t want to use vi(m) you should probably set EDITOR in your .bashrc and visudo and probably other programs will use your editor of choice.

        • JPAKx4@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          2·
          5 days ago

          There may be certain times where it’s all that’s available, I think I remember having to edit fstab in some recovery state in vi

        • johant@lemmy.ml
          1·
          2 days ago

          The EDITOR or VISUAL environment variables are usually read by command line tools to launch your preferred editor. You could set VISUAL to nano before launching visudo and you would be editing the sudoers file in nano.

        • Jumuta@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          5 days ago

          /etc/sudoers?

          you can just edit that with nano or whatever, the visudo thing they tell you to use is goofy and I don’t like it

    • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
      5·
      5 days ago

      vim isn’t required for any files, you just followed online tutorials for how to edit those files instead of RTFM

      terminal text editing is convoluted because it has to strike a balance between figuring out when a keypress is part of the text you’re typing, vs when it’s a command you’re using, and making sure that all the editor commands the designer wanted are accessible.

      vim is great because it allows for thousands more editing commands and macros, and much more customization of the editor, up to allowing plugins that emulate other functionality. As it stands, my setup basically functions as a full, lightweight-ish, multi-language IDE that rivals Emacs or Visual Studio.

      On top of all that, I don’t have to move my hands away from the homerow of keys to navigate or edit, which may not seem like much, but adds up to a lot of avoid typos and time saved from moving my hands to reach the arrows/delete/home/end/pgup/pgdn.

      Some examples:

      h, j,k,l move left, down, up, and right respectively, but they can be combined with a number to move that many rows or columns; e.g. 6j will move down 6 rows

      dd deletes a line, but using a number + d + a movement will delete that many characters/lines in the path of the cursor: e.g. 34dl will delete 34 characters to the right of the cursor, 12dk will delete 12 lines up.

      gg will take you to the first line, G will take you to the last, and number + either will take you to that line: e.g. 3275gg or 3275G will take you to line 3275

      and finally you can use /text or regex pattern you want to search for and Enter to search the document for the first occurence below your current location, and then use n to search for the next occurence, or N to search for the previous

      That doesn’t even scratch the surface (that’s just the cheatsheet, which only scratches the surface), but if you can get a handle on only what I’ve said, and switching between input and command mode (i and Esc respectively), the speedup to navigation alone will make it seem more sensible.

      And as always, don’t forget to :wq (write to file and quit)

    • Knuschberkeks@leminal.space
      5·
      5 days ago

      seems like you need to try micro. It’s like nano, but with more sensible standard keybinds imho, as well as syntax highlighting and global clipboard use.

    • Karmmah@lemmy.world
      32·
      5 days ago

      I used nano when I started but now I am using vim for one year already. I’d recommend taking a few days where you only use vim and I think you will see why people like it. With a few motions you can be much faster than you would be in Nano.

      • jaxiiruff@lemmy.zip
        4·
        5 days ago

        One of the big reasons I switched to nixos is that I mostly need to use the console only for updating my system by editing the configuration file using nano. I do very little besides that thankfully while the GUI side of linux gets better everyday.

      • n0x0n@feddit.orgDeutsch
        3·
        5 days ago

        I’m using Linux since 1998 and still like nano. I can use vi, but prefer nano when it’s available.

    • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
      22·
      5 days ago

      Nano is hella confusing too. Since when is ^ = Ctrl?

      And why dont they tell you that Ctrl+S Ctrl+C Ctrl+X works?

      • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
        3·
        5 days ago

        Since 1968

        As for why: arbitrary choice, they just needed a printable character they could show on screen, for when people pressed it and the terminal echoed it back out to them.

        • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
          1·
          4 days ago

          Yes but I am not that old and never saw it anywhere. So while it makes as much sense as hjkl it is not beginner friendly.