A curated list of useful command line apps, in celebration of the TUI.

“Knowledge brings fear” (Mars University Mission Statement)

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Contents

• *nix/*nux
  • Automation
  • Backup
  • Benchmarking
  • Cloud Services
  • Compression
  • Content Creation
  • Conversion
  • Data Processing
  • Databases
  • Developer
  • Dotfile Management
  • Download Utilities
  • Email
  • Encryption
  • FTP
  • Filesystem Management
  • Games
  • IRC
  • Media
  • Miscellaneous
  • Networking
  • Presentation
  • Productivity
  • RSS
  • SSH
  • System
  • Terminal
  • Text Editors
  • VPN
  • Version Control
  • World Wide Web
• BSD
• Linux
• Mac OS X
• Helpers

*nix/*nux

Automation

• Ansible - Automate deployment, configuration, and upgrading.
• fswatch - Cross-platform file change monitor with multiple backends.

Backup

• Amanda - Open Source Network Backup for Linux, Windows, UNIX and OS X.
• Attic - Deduplicating backup program written in Python.
• Bacula - Manage backups, recovery, and verification of computer data across a network of computers of different kinds.
• BorgBackup - Significantly improved fork of Attic.
• duply - Easily create GPG encrypted, compressed backups of any data almost anywhere.
• mysqldump-secure - Secure mysqldump script with encryption, compression, logging, blacklisting and Nagios monitoring integration.

Benchmarking

• loadtest - Runs a load test on the selected HTTP URL.
• pv - Terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline.
• siege - http load testing and benchmarking utility.

Cloud Services

• awscli - Official Amazon AWS command-line interface.
• cadaver - Command-line WebDAV client for Unix.

Compression

• archivemount - FUSE filesystem using libarchive to mount archives.
• dtrx - Takes all the hassle out of extracting archives.

Content Creation

• GitBook - Library and cmd utility to generate GitBooks.

Conversion

• Echo - Convert HTML tables to JSON/CSVs.
• Pandoc - A universal document converter.
• binchunker - Converts a CD image in a ".bin / .cue" format (sometimes ".raw / .cue") to a set of .iso and .cdr tracks.

Databases

• mycli - Command line interface for MySQL, MariaDB, and Percona with auto-completion and syntax highlighting.
• pgcli - Command line interface for Postgres with auto-completion and syntax highlighting.

Data Processing

• jq - Lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor.

Developer

• Cookiecutter - Command-line utility that creates projects from cookiecutters (project templates).
• Critical - Extract & Inline Critical-path CSS in HTML pages.
• Grunt - The JavaScript Task Runner.
• HTTPie - User-friendly cURL replacement featuring intuitive UI, JSON support, syntax highlighting, wget-like downloads, extensions, etc.
• Publoy - Command line tool to deploy your static webapps via Dropbox.
• The Silver Searcher - A blazingly fast tool for searching code.
• Yarn - Deterministic, secure alternative to npm.
• bat - Go implement CLI, cURL-like tool for humans.
• bcal - Byte CALculator for storage conversions and calculations.
• caniuse-cmd - All the power of caniuse.com with none of the GUI.
• clog - A conventional changelog for the rest of us.
• gulp - Automate and enhance your build workflow.
• how2 - stackoverflow from the terminal.
• http-prompt - Interactive command-line HTTP client featuring autocomplete and syntax highlighting, built on HTTPie and prompt_toolkit.
• penthouse - Critical Path CSS Generator.
• saws - Supercharged AWS Command Line Interface.
• sift - Fast and powerful open source alternative to grep.

Dotfile Management

• dotdrop - Save your dotfiles once, deploy them everywhere.
• homeshick - Git dotfiles synchronizer written in bash.

Download Utilities

• aria2 - Lightweight multi-protocol & multi-source command-line download utility.
• peerflix - Streaming torrent client for node.js.

Email

• Alpine - Fast, easy to use email client that is suitable for both the inexperienced email user as well as for the most demanding of power users.
• Mutt - All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less.
• Notmuch - Fast, global-search and tag-based email system.
• OfflineIMAP - Two-way sync your e-mail mailboxes as a local Maildir.
• Sup - A curses threads-with-tags style email client.
• Terjira - Command line power tool for Jira.
• abook - text-based addressbook program designed to use with mutt mail client.
• imapsync - IMAP synchronisation, sync, copy or migration tool.
• isync - Command line application to synchronize Maildir and IMAP4 mailboxes both ways.
• piler - Feature rich open source email archiving solution, and a viable alternative to commercial email archiving products.

Encryption

• EncFS - Provides an encrypted filesystem in user-space.
• GnuPG - Complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard as defined by RFC4880 (also known as PGP).

Filesystem Management

• FDUPES - Identify or delete duplicate files residing within specified directories.
• Midnight Commander - Feature rich visual file manager.
• Ncdu - Disk usage analyzer with an ncurses interface.
• ranger - Minimalistic visual file manager featuring curses interface with VI key bindings.
• vifm - ncurses based file manager with vi like keybindings/modes/options/commands/configuration, which also borrows some useful ideas from mutt.
• zfsnap - Rolling ZFS snapshots the easy way.

FTP

• CurlFtpFS - Filesystem for accessing FTP hosts based on FUSE and libcurl.
• LFTP - Sophisticated ftp/http client, and a file transfer program supporting a number of network protocols.
• NcFTP - A set of free application programs implementing the File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

Games

• Angband - Angband is a free, single-player dungeon exploration game.
• Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - Roguelike set in a post-apocalyptic world.
• Curse of War - Fast-paced real-time action strategy game.
• Frotz - Interpreter for Infocom games and other Z-machine games.
• Nethack - Single player dungeon exploration game that runs on a wide variety of computer systems.
• dopewars - Deal in drugs on the streets of New York, amassing a huge fortune and paying off the loan shark, while avoiding the ever-annoying police.
• vitetris - Terminal-based Tetris clone, much like the early Tetris games by Nintendo.

IRC

• BitlBee - IRC to other chat networks gateway.
• Irssi - The client of the future.
• WeeChat - WeeChat is a fast, light and extensible chat client.

Media

• AtomicParsely - Lightweight command line program for reading, parsing and setting metadata into MPEG-4 files.
• Audiogrep - Creates audio supercuts.
• Beets - The music geek's media organizer.
• FFmpeg - A complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video.
• Gifsicle - Command-line tool for creating, editing, and getting information about GIF images and animations.
• HandBrakeCLI - Tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs.
• Legofy - Python program that takes a static image or gif and makes it so that it looks as if it was built out of LEGO.
• MKVToolNix - A set of tools to create, alter and inspect Matroska files under Linux, other Unices and Windows.
• MediaInfo - Convenient unified display of the most relevant technical and tag data for video and audio files.
• OptiPNG - PNG optimizer that recompresses image files to a smaller size, without losing any information.
• Pngcrush - An optimizer for PNG (Portable Network Graphics) files.
• Shellpic - Display images inline in the shell, ASCII-art is so 2013.
• Video Transcoding Scripts - Utilities to transcode, inspect and convert videos.
• Videogrep - Automatic supercuts with python.
• abcde - A Better CD Encoder.
• cmus - Small, fast and powerful console music player for Unix-like operating systems.
• mopidy - Self hosted MPD daemon that connects to Spotify and Soundcloud.
• moviemon - Everything about your movies within the command line.
• mp3fs - FUSE-based transcoding filesystem from FLAC to MP3.
• mp4v2 - Library and tools to provide functions to read, create, and modify mp4 files.
• mpg123 - Fast console MPEG Audio Player and decoder library.
• ncmpcpp - NCurses based MPD client.
• subdownloader - Downloading subtitles for one or more files is just a command away.
• ttystudio - A terminal-to-gif recorder minus the headaches.
• youtube-dl - A small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites.

Miscellaneous

• FIGlet - Program for making large letters out of ordinary text.
• ansiweather - Weather in your terminal, with ANSI colors and Unicode symbols.
• license - Create LICENSEs from the command-line.
• pockyt - composable Pocket client for the terminal.
• wego - Weather client for the terminal.

Networking

• Bandwidth Monitor NG - Small and simple console-based live network and disk io bandwidth monitor.
• Blucat - netcat for Bluetooth.
• Netcat - Networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using the TCP/IP protocol.
• Nethogs - Linux 'net top' tool.
• gping - Ping, but with a graph.
• iftop - Display bandwidth usage on an interface.
• localtunnel - Exposes your localhost to the world for easy testing and sharing.
• mtr - Combines the functionality of the 'traceroute' and 'ping' programs in a single network diagnostic tool.
• ngrep - grep as a network packet analyzer.
• nmap - Network discovery and security auditing utility.
• vnStat - Console-based network traffic monitor for Linux and BSD that keeps a log of network traffic for the selected interface(s).

Presentation

• WOPR - Simple markup language for creating rich terminal reports, presentations and infographics.
• termui - Cross-platform, easy-to-compile, and fully-customizable terminal dashboard.

Productivity

• Remind - Sophisticated calendar and alarm program.
• Taskwarrior - Free and Open Source Software that manages your TODO list from your command line.
• Timetrap - Simple command line timetracker.
• Watson - Elegant time tracking with a CLI.
• doing - A command line tool for keeping track of what you’re doing and tracking what you’ve done.
• idea - Lightweight CLI tool and module for keeping ideas in a safe place quick and easy.
• ledger - Powerful, double-entry accounting system that is accessed from the UNIX command-line.
• pdfgrep - Command line utility to search text in PDF files.
• pin-cushion - Simple, maintained CLI interface to the Pinboard.in API.
• woof - Simple one-off HTTP file sharing.

RSS

• newsbeuter - The Mutt of RSS feed readers.
• rss2email - A free, open-source tool for Windows and UNIX for getting news from RSS feeds in email.

Security

• Aircrack-ng - 802.11 WEP and WPA-PSK keys cracking program that can recover keys once enough data packets have been captured.
• Let's Encrypt - A free, automated and open Certificate Authority.

SSH

• autossh - Automatically restart SSH sessions and tunnels.
• ironssh - E2E encrypt files transferred using sftp/scp and share access with other users.
• sshfs - Locally mount a remote folder via SSH.
• storm - A command line tool to manage your ssh connections.

System

• ApacheTop - Curses-based top-like display for Apache information, including requests per second, bytes per second, most popular URLs, etc.
• dstat - Versatile replacement for vmstat, iostat, netstat and ifstat.
• htop - An interactive process viewer.
• iotop - Find out what's stressing and increasing load on your hard disks.
• maybe - See what a program does before deciding whether you really want it to happen.
• netboot.xyz - Boot multiple Operating System installers or utilities over the network from a single menu.
• screenFetch - Fetches system/theme information in terminal for desktop screenshots.

Terminal

• Fisherman - A blazing fast, modern plugin manager for fish shell.
• Marker - The terminal command palette.
• MultiTail - Monitor logfiles and command output in multiple windows in a terminal, colorize, filter and merge.
• PathPicker - After parsing the output from a command, PathPicker presents you with a nice UI to select which files you're interested in.
• SCREEN - A "window manager" for the console and terminals.
• asciinema - Free and open source solution for recording terminal sessions and sharing them on the web.
• autojump - A cd command that learns - easily navigate directories from the command line.
• bgrep - Like grep but for binary strings.
• byobu - Text-based window manager and terminal multiplexer.
• ccat - Colorizing the cat command.
• cheat - Create and view interactive cheatsheets on the command-line.
• desk - Lightweight workspace manager for the shell.
• dit - Dotfile manager that hooks into git.
• fundle - Minimalist package manager for fish shell.
• fzf - A general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder.
• pick - Fuzzy select anything.
• tmux - A terminal multiplexer.
• yank - Yank terminal output to clipboard.
• z - Tracks your most used directories, based on 'frecency'.

Text Editors

• Diakonos - A linux editor for the masses.
• Emacs - An extensible, customizable text editor.
• Kakoune - Modal editor with multiple selections and orthogonal design.
• Neovim - Modern version of the Vim editor with many advanced features.
• Vim - Advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set.
• Vis - A highly efficient text editor.

Version Control

• Bazaar - Easily manage source code on Windows, Ubuntu, GNU/Linux, and Mac OS X.
• Git - Git is a free and open source distributed version control system.
• Mercurial - Free, distributed source control management tool.
• gitfs - Version controlled file system.
• tig - ncurses based text-mode interface for Git.

VPN

• OpenVPN - Full-featured open source SSL VPN solution.
• racoon - Internet Key Exchange (IKE) daemon for automatically keying IPsec connections.
• strongSwan - Open Source IPsec for Linux.

World Wide Web

• ELinks - Advanced and well-established feature-rich text mode web (HTTP/FTP/..) browser.
• GoAccess - Real-time visual web log analyzer and interactive viewer.
• googler - Google Search, Google Site Search, Google News from the terminal.
• pageres - Capture screenshots of websites in various resolutions.

BSD

• ezjail - Jail administration framework.
• pkgsrc - Portable package build system.
• poudriere - Port/Package build and test system.

Linux

• IPTraf - Console-based network statistics utility for Linux.
• aptly - Swiss army knife for Debian repository management.
• btrfs - Copy on write (CoW) filesystem for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration.
• deborphan - Finds packages installed on your Debian/GNU system that have no other packages depending on them.

Mac OS X

• Fink - The full world of Unix Open Source software for Darwin.
• Homebrew - The missing package manager for OS X.
• MacPorts - Compile, install and upgrade either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software.
• Night Shift Shell Utility - Simple shell utility to control the macOS Night Shift feature.
• XLD - Tool to decode/convert/play various 'lossless' audio files.
• itunes-remote - Control iTunes via CLI.
• mas - Mac App Store command line interface.
• reminders-cli - A simple CLI for interacting with Reminders.
• tag - Manipulate tags on files and query for files with those tags.

Helpers

• crontab.guru - Cron schedule expression editor.

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License

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