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.
Most listed in some form elsewhere, but
- Ugrep
- ranger/lf
- tmux (splitting terminal and detatching/reattaching when I’m sshing onto server, etc)
I’ve also been enjoying Kate. It’s a decent text editor, but the ability to Ctrl + / to pipe selected lines through any Linux command (Uniq, shuf, etc) is a bit of a superpower for an editor
grep goes crazy if you know your regex
I love flexibility with regex, personally I use ugrep as it also allows utilization of boolean and/or/not logic for more complicated searches.
A few that I use every day:
- Fish shell
- Starship.rs
- Broot (a brilliant filesystem navigator)
- Helix editor (My favorite editor / IDE, truly the successor to vim IMO)
- Topgrade (updates everything)
Do you have experience with either ranger, lf, or yazi? I’m wondering how broot compares. Big fan of file ranger, and this looks very similar.
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
Also works on Twitch with the added benefit of NOT playing ads (you still get breaks, just with a placeholder screen instead of the commercial).
mpv has yt-dlp support built in, so it can just play the streams directly.
Wait how?
I just run
mpv $URL
This is the only way to watch twitch
With their huge, clunky UI and my 1080p screen, yeah it is.