7 Essential Command Line Tools (2022)

[@echobucket]

For those watching in 2024, exa got renamed to eza.

[@SmashLpTv]

Thank you very much, kind sir or madam!

[@alisanan9090]

Not to be confused. Exa was deprecated, so eza is a maintained fork of exa.

[@danjto]

If you forget and install exa, you end up with eza anyway, at least that's what happened to me using pacman

[@randint]

So THAT's why the exa I installed just stopped working one day!

[@baruchben-david4196]

Must not apply to all distros, though. I installed this as exa; in fact, I can't find eza either in the synaptic package manager or in apt.

[@ilvestaavi]

Using dash to jump between last place is actually available for normal cd as well. Plus in git you can switch between branches.

[@DavidRadkowski]

Despite having more than 20 years of Linux under my belt, I still enjoy watching those little gems from TechCraft 👍 well done 👍

[@tech_craft]

That’s part of the joy of Linux for me: there’s always more to explore and learn about.

[@jda4887]

likewise, ive discovered new toys ! For my personal use as i have to stick to traditional tools for work (we still have plenty of AIX scripts to maintain).

[@user-kq7xf6fb6f]

senpai 😊

[@ThrivingInLife]

Midnight Commander brings back the nostalgic Norton Commander - Before we had windows, we had norton commander.

[@shinwadone]

And total commander on windows

[@frank-michaeljaeschke4798]

As I was familiar with Norton Commander, mc was one of the first tools I used when I started my Linux journey back in 1997.

[@beatnixnthings]

I really like the pace of your videos. Anyone else, this would've been a 20-30 minute video. The pace makes it digestible, and the chapters/time codes mean I can jump back in to rewatch a given section if it didn't quite stick. Explanations are crisp, concise, and clear. nice work.

[@OddWoz]

Exactly. I’ve learned so much from his videos that weren’t well explained/demoed elsewhere, or at all.

[@polyglot84]

Hands down one of the most useful KZbin videos ever! Thank you 🎉

[@scialomy]

If your system/terminal allows, exa --icons is a wonder!

[@Endelin]

I prefer "lsd" over "exa", simliar color features but it also incorporates Nerdfonts symbols for filetypes.

[@umop3plsdn]

ya i came here to say the same thing. I used exa for years but now use lsd and get icons and all kinds of things its great

[@pedrokatuniz8936]

i wasn't aware of lsd, but exa is doing the same thing now if you use the --icons flag

[@umop3plsdn]

@@pedrokatuniz8936 i used exa for years but lsd is leagues better. def try it out

[@hotlinefrenzy]

I have eza setup with filetype and folder icons, using the additional arguments and made it alias with ls

[@rossgeography]

Wow - colour coding in the terminal ! you’re making me want to learn more terminal tools - I know it’s powerful but the simple addition of colour is making it way more enticing !

[@RagasonPvP]

I've watched many of these kinds of videos in the past, but this is just next level; I think I'm going to use every tool mentioned going forward!

[@superxereu]

Watching these videos feels like getting a power up playing video games. Very useful gems here, thank you for the superb job you've done

[@nebilkisa8594]

Hi Rob! I am glad I discovered your channel about 2 years ago. In your case it is really not about the number of videos uploaded, but the content and value added to people's productivity watching your content. You have a great way to present the subject matter at hand without any fuss and distracting pop ups, extra comments or any other annoying extra, like some unsuitable background music :-) It is straight to the point and boiled down to the essential piece of information. Regarding this particular video, something new learnt every day. Despite being a seasoned Unix/Linux power user, I added the presented little command line tools to few of my systems, MacOS, RPI and Debian laptop. Thanks a lot and keep it coming! PS: +1 for an extra video about MC 🙂

[@perutherford]

Please talk more about mc. Used it years ago and didn’t know it was still around. I would like to know what it is capable of these days.

[@tech_craft]

👍 it’s an amazing piece of software. I really like software that sticks around so I don’t have always learn something new for a core task like file management

[@jdmayfield88]

I LOVE MIDNIGHT COMMANDER! Been using it for almost 25 years! So handy. Also use it as my primary IDE. Very slim, simple, works through ssh, and really an amazing Swiss Army Knife of command-line utilities. Also, what caught my attention to watch this video. Thanks for the great content!

[@petergoodall6258]

Derived closely from Norton Commander which we were using in the late ‘80s

[@StefanWolfrum]

Amazing as always, Rob! I‘ve used unix based machines since the early 90s (SUN & SGI machines at university) and up to today (Macs, Raspberry Pis). But I didn‘t know that folks have thought about how to make even the most basic commands like ls, cat, grep, cd even better! Will try all of them asap! Oh, and MidnightCommander!! Is that still around! Wow! I still remember Norton Commander which was the original, I think?! Thanks so much, again!!

[@tech_craft]

I came to mc from Norton Commander. It’s such a well-designed interaction model that I find it hard to go back.

[@johntamplin]

@@tech_craft Aha! I thought I recognised the pedigree of Norton Commander; happy memories. Now, we just need to find the 'offspring' of Borland Sidekick and Wordstar, and I'll be ecstatic. :)

[@StefanWolfrum]

@@tech_craft Yes, of course, Norton Commander! My oh my, flashback memories!

[@repr0bate]

I would love a full video on Midnight Commander. Great video--thanks!

[@mayurchavhan8590]

I'm fan of these tools and I love how well you've explained this. I would love to see more these kinds of tools videos which makes Linux experience more powerful.

[@josimarneto1031]

This is my favorite video ever. Of all time. Including all platforms. And I am putting Star Wars, 2001 - A Space Odyssey, West World, Ex Machina, and all those TV series, everything there, for comparison. And I even didn't finish the video yet (I am still at the zoxide part, as I am installing every shown program, along the way).

[@Gideonblade]

Those are useful tools. Thank you and I am glad that you are back producing content.

[@micleh]

I'd very much appreciate a video on mc. KZbin has no good videos, especially not by guys like you with perfect explaining and presentation skills. I've been using a dual pane file manager for the first time on dos way back, i.e. Norton Commander, and have been using mc from the first time when I started using Linux back in 2003. Thanks for these helpful videos.

[@tech_craft]

Thanks! I'm editing the mc tutorial at the moment - it should land this coming weekend.

[@brickviking667]

@@tech_craft glad to hear that - I've been using MC fairly regularly since about 1997/98, and it has been my go--to file manager during almost all that time. There are (of course) others such as workman, nautilus and dolphin, but mc runs under text mode and will run just about anywhere from MS-DOS to modern Unix-likes. I'd like to see an in-depth discussion of mc, not just the X for dummies level.

[@elatedbento]

Entr is an absolute gem! Thanks for sharing ❤❤

[@krzysztoflupa259]

true, the rest of them are useless

[@elatedbento]

@@krzysztoflupa259 useless if you already know them, yes. Entr was the only one I didn't now and was an absolute gem. fzf, bat, eza, etc. I use daily and are amazing. fzf is just excellent.

[@Child0TK]

Great video. I've used MC for years. Also NC from back in DOS days, it became a staple tool for me. I would love to see more about MC and see how I could maybe use it more.

[@alanjrobertson]

Yes please to an MC video! Definitely going to investigate these replacements!

[@hanspetervollhorst1]

I am using MC since I switched from DOS/ Windows (using the Norton Commander NC) there. Really interested in seeing a full video. It is such a blizz.

[@techtipsuk]

I must type these commands 1000s of times each day how did I not know these exist. Thanks.

[@Xiriousful]

ncdu is definitely one that deserves to be on this list. Very very useful

[@MkhanyisiMadlavana]

i first used mc (midnight commander) in 2005 at varsity. you can make the both panes be different computers over SSH (or FTP) and transfer files between two different computers (different from your computer). it also comes with a basic editor `mcedit` and its read-only viewer `mcview`. stopped using mc in 2010s and im surprised it is still an active project. gonna install it for old times sake, lol

[@Skylla54]

entr 😍 I was not aware of it and now its a tiny joy of today learning journey

[@philipdavidson1558]

Great video, thanks for all your informative content. I would very much like to see a full video on Midnight Commander

[@user-tb5pf9tw6i]

Hi Tech, Thanks for your Video. I've installed fzf to help me in my daily work

[@tassaron]

I love mc so much. The built in text editor of mc is also pretty good (supports multiple files open at once) but it's a harder comparison against the sea of excellent text editors.

[@WilliamDye-willdye]

I haven't used exa because grc does a good job of colorizing output from ls and other basic commands. Might be worth a look, tho. Thanks for the suggestion.

[@mrsuncure1259]

Thank You, i learned a couple new tools. It's very helpful

[@G0USL]

Ive been using MC since the 90s! Another excellent legacy file manager was Xtree Gold. Thanks for some excellent pointers to useful programs.

[@PaPaTheGMan1215]

Thanks for the informative video. I also love MC and feel I've only scratched the surface of its capabilities. I would very much enjoy a dedicated MC video.

[@GuilherHast]

Usually these videos about command line tools teach me nothing new. This one was very different

[@JoeSteele]

This is great stuff! I was not aware of fzf or entr -- I will definitely be adding those to my daily use

[@BachPhotography]

Awesome bunch of tools, I've been using Ubuntu professionally for over 10 years and still learned a lot here

[@nobody2937]

Perfect... Had everything set up on Ubuntu 24.04. ^_^ Thank you ...

[@melodymonger]

Great selection of really useful tools well explained - thank you 👍.

[@964tractorboy]

Always pick-up something useful, or am reminded of something else useful. I could get behind a video on mc for sure!

[@embeddedbastler6406]

I like how 4 of those 7 tools are written in Rust.

[@jankymaker9680]

Incredibly, more videos like this please

[@barjo_]

Installed a couple here from your list that look super useful. Good list and well delivered!

[@hipnodude1]

Great video! Slight correction when you were talking about z -. The dash is actually shell thing not a zoxide thing. Its a common way for commands to reference "last". So cd - works as well. Funny enough it also works in git! So git checkout - will actually checkout the previous branch you were on as well. Or git merge - will merge your previously checked out branch into your current one! Not trying to nitpick, just love sharing knowledge on this stuff! :)

[@truefirstmagic]

Surprised you didn’t mention the benefits of ripgrep (rg) over stock grep. Besides the more readable output, and the fact that it can detect when you’re running the output through a pipe so it can keep that output clean, there’s the SPEEEEEED. For any search involving multiple files/recursive directory structures, it absolutely wrecks grep.

[@tech_craft]

I wanted to keep this one under 10 minutes so had to cut quite a lot from my original script. The speed boost is real though!

[@rrr92462]

Very good and useful vid. Loaded and aliased exa and bat.

[@oldpain7625]

Awesome! Some very useful tools you've shown there. Thanks dude! Subbed!

[@laughingvampire7555]

exa and lsd are both great replacements for standard ls. cat is misunderstood, is not meant for printing files to the terminal is meant to be used in pair with `split` and redirections

[@felixkohler111]

Nice overview, thanks. One favorite use of bat for me is displaying syntax colored manpages. Add the following line to your ~/.bashrc and enjoy: export MANPAGER="sh -c 'col -bx | bat -l man -p'"

[@enkiimuto1041]

I like your enthusiasm good sir. Subscribed.

[@nilsgg]

Would love to see more about mc

[@vitormelo22]

I didn't know about entr, is amazingo for fast test.

[@tech_craft]

I couldn’t live without entr - testing is my exact use case for it

[@andreasgerlach4963]

Thanks for the video! Although I only use relatively simple command line procedures I would like to watch a deeper tutorial about MC because this is used by many Webspace providers for managing files via SSH. It would be great to be able to use it maybe more efficient :)

[@saxtant]

Of course ls can do colour too. The tree function is nice, makes exa a little better than du -a

[@alexandrostsagkaropoulos]

That was so helpful. Thanks a lot!

[@maurolimaok]

I really like this channel. Thanks for the useful tips.

[@tiagodejesus456]

Great video!

[@arthuradriaens6622]

I think, for people used to vim shortcuts, that lf (terminal file manager) seems to be a more intuitive alternative to Midnight Commander

[@wojciech-kulik]

Wow, huge amount of useful tips!

[@ivanjermakov]

I recommend checking out ranger and vifm as a vim-like mc alternative

[@gimcrack555]

I use ranger. I set it up prefect for my workflow. mc is great as well. I also like nnn and vifm is also great. We power Linux users, stick what we know and like. I got familiar with ranger so I stuck with ranger. I also use micro as my text editor. I don't need all those bells and whistles that vim and emac has. micro to me is like nano on steroids.

[@vorncoza]

Nice video - simple and helpful :) Looking forward to more videos from your channel.

[@murtadha96]

This is really useful. Thank you!

[@n.a.s1096]

This is great. Thank you.

[@reidchatham]

This was awesome, thank you! Wheres that midnight commander video?

[@jyvben1520]

i use mc/mcedit daily, just discovered the option this week to open mc with 2 given folders, used when working without gui on rpi , mount usb drive sdb1 to /mnt, run mc ./ /mnt/afolder , ready to copy newer files after quick compare (control+x d q) + F5 to copy The editor can open multiple files and export/import files or clips. run mc -e afile ... or mcedit afile ...

[@simplegametutorials1341]

Eza is also a good replacement for exa. Does exactly the same thing

[@JohnWDisco]

MC is the best for when I am remotely changing backend files around on my servers. A new one started playing with is Monotty Desktopio. Pretty neat. It’s wotth checking out.

[@NigelAtkinson256]

I use 'The silver searcher' - which is very similar to ripgrep. Seems nobody knows that plain old ls has colours though, most linux distros I've worked on add "alias ls='ls --color=auto' if they detect a colour capable terminal. Perhaps Mac OS doesn't? entr looks handy.

[@paulhammond8583]

Mint video this one, cheers!

[@jacobtb1]

super helpful

[@gerion1980]

This an excellent compilation of useful commands. And I see you are using org mode. Yay!

[@tech_craft]

Org mode is too good to abandon. I’m getting ever deeper on it.

[@gerion1980]

@@tech_craft I am torn between org and Obsidian. Two good choices. I am always amazed to see what you can do with org and what is marketed as “new” feature in many apps. This new outliner (bike? Bicycle?) is another example. 🤷🏻‍♂️

[@gerion1980]

@@tech_craft By the way, an org mode video would be highly appreciated! Very interested to see and hear how you use it, and if you, by any chance, use it on mobile devices as well! 👋🙏

[@aydnbilgin1627]

TNice tutorials was easy to follow.

[@Jarek.]

Pet! Love it for snippets, 'pet search' or 'pet exec'

[@DaniIhzaFarrosi]

Another suggestion, turn on your Vim syntax highlighting :)

[@yehudahecht1520]

Generally speaking, it's a bad idea to alias commands to existing commands (e.g. exa to ls) because if you ever need the functionality of the underlying command you'll be at a loss why you don't have it until you remember you randomly aliased it to another command that one time long ago. Better to just adjust your workflow to write exa instead of ls whenever you want to do what that command can provide.

[@martiananomaly]

Your terminal is really sleek and neat.

[@tech_craft]

It's Kitty terminal with the Dracula theme.

[@TheDude-fx6tk]

​@@tech_craftHi, may I know which font did you use in this video? It's really cool 🤩

[@maxdzyubak]

Amazing! Thanks! Good luch!

[@crispgm]

There are several inotify libs in various languages. I didn't know ENTR before, so I made one by myself.

[@joelpww]

Awesome video

[@NathanielHarari]

I just wanted to thank you for your channel (which I’ve only come across a few days ago). Thanks to you, I upgraded my Raspberry Pi 400 to Bullseye, I actually subscribed to Blink plan (it was amazing..I never knew about it before), and I learned even more about Tmux. That’s just in the last few days. I used to use EMacs all the time but I stopped a while back since Notes and the apple OS stuff integrates so nicely and does most of what I need. But now, I just reinstalled Doom on my Raspberry Pi and I’m wondering about your emacs setup using Blink. Could you please make a video about that? Thanks again for the amazing info! 👍

[@NathanielHarari]

Oh and to top it off, I also installed VS Code on my Pi and access it with Blink. Amazing.

[@tech_craft]

I’m working on building my own ‘ecosystem’ so I’m not dependent on Apple, Google or any single big tech vendor. I want to control my data and Emacs is a big part of making that practical.

[@NathanielHarari]

@@tech_craft Yeah I agree with you and that’s part of why I started learning emacs and loving it. But, in fact, I learned that (for me), Apple does most of what I want emacs to do and my data is all backed up to my raspberry pi as well as in iCloud. And transferring the content of notes is actually pretty easy - it’s not something like a Word document. However, your video made me realize how much I miss tinkering with and using emacs in org mode especially and how amazing and useful it is. So I’d love to see a video dedicated to emacs on your pi and how you use it in conjunction with blink and your ipad because, honestly, I’d like to try the same. I just reinstalled Doom last night on my pi in expectation of me trying something like that. 😃

[@harijagarnauth]

This is awesome!

[@karim3741]

An actual good linux commands, loved it ❤🔥

[@MCLooyverse]

I don't really understand the point of a file manager. ls, rm, mv, and cp have always been sufficient for me.

[@tech_craft]

One task that definitely ‘better’ in my opinion is copying lots of files. I find mc to be far more robust than cp. Also built in support for SFTP means a uniform interface everywhere.

[@MCLooyverse]

@@tech_craft Ah! I've barely delved into FTP. I've just used rsync a bit to get by.

[@tech_craft]

Rsync is absolutely great for bulk copies, I find that SFTP is easier for browsing about and grabbing the occasional file.

[@OddWoz]

I’ve used Linux and hosted basic servers and such for a very long time now… but I still have gaps in my knowledge because of mostly teaching myself. Your videos and tutorials have really taught me a lot, filled knowledge gaps, and got me up to speed on a lot things. Really appreciate your videos. They’ve helped me tremendously compared to other content creators & tutorials I’ve followed over the years. Yours stand out. Thank you!

[@lal102]

What terminal application are you using? Thanks for the video.

[@tech_craft]

It's Blink Shell on the iPad with few customisations on the host. I have a full video on that setup here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/bn3GhXRropuSqtU

[@IdoSamuelson]

i'll recommend LSD vs exa (via cargo/Rust), btop, gitui, mcfly(cargo/Rust), Dust(cargo/Rust) and the main one topgrade (cargo/Rust)

[@k-c]

This was useful.

[@TehGettinq]

this video is a bit old but all the zoxide feature shown here are in normal cd, you even get lots more than that with fish.

[@stylesg7818]

Thank you so much.

[@Skatox]

Almost 20 years using linux and I didn't know these tools.

[@jmileshc]

MC please. Interesting regarding the other utilities too. Thank you.

[@DigiDriftZone]

Quick question, why starship over oh-my-zsh? - I find the latter more intuitive and has more helpful conveniences out of the box for things like web development (e.g. ruby on rails).

[@tech_craft]

No particularly well thought out reason. I was using OMZ for many years. I tried out Starship when looking for something a little simpler to deal with and I haven't gone back. Both are excellent, and certainly beat the stock shell by some margin.

[@tylerljohnson]

great suggestions! btw, seems like recently *bat* as been renamed to *batcat* on debian.

[@DanKardell]

Aweome tools! BTW. what do you use for your terminal prompt?

[@tech_craft]

I'm using Starship: starship.rs/

[@pavelperina7629]

Good. I'd like to see something about script, tmux, screen ... i found script somewhat useful for session recording and I recall using tmux or screen in 90s (hell, i'm old) for keeping opened terminal session when connection dies

[@rafaeldietrich8050]

Amazin video! Do you use emacs org mode? Whats your note taking setup?

[@tech_craft]

I do use org mode. For note taking I use org-roam and I have everything synchronised between my machines with Syncthing.

[@emilymarriott5927]

Fyi, exa is no longer maintained. eza is an actively maintained fork of exa and is the one you should use.

[@VulcanOnWheels]

I don't quite understand how what you demonstrated in ripgrep differs from ls or exa. Other than that, good video. Thanks for introduction to those tools.

[@ForeverZer0]

ls/exa/lsd/eza essentially just lists files/directories in the file system. ripgrep is a faster alternative to grep, which searches the contents of files with complex search patterns, regular expressions, etc., so they are doing very different tasks.

[@nadavrot]

I still don’t see any productive use case for entr, even for developers. Thanks for introducing me to mc! Believe it or not, I was looking for a Windows Commander clone that you can run from the command line!