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7 Awesome Command-Line Tools
Some familiar tools and some you probably haven’t tried yet
The terminal/command line is a sacred tool that developers have under their belt. It is possibly the most used tool for programmers. I believe that is because of how lightweight it is and also the unbelievable amount of things you can do with it. Some developers even go the extra mile to do everything inside of the terminal. Kudos to them.
I’ll be showing some of the CLI (Command-Line Interface) tools that I personally think are awesome and use pretty much on a daily basis. Granted, there are so many tools out there for the command line that this list barely scratches the surface.
1. vim
What kind of terminal list wouldn’t include vim? There are tons of debates about whether or not vim is the editor for programming or if it’s a tool invented for lunatics, but we will not be discussing that here.
For those of you who are not familiar with vim, it is a text editor that improves on the out-of-the-box vi tool shipped with any UNIX system. It allows you to edit or create a file through your terminal.
This tool is helpful if you want to quickly edit a file while you are in the terminal and don’t want to open up your IDE or a GUI text editor like VSCode or Sublime Text.
Keep in mind that this tool can be a little tricky to use when first learning it, as many of the shortcuts are not as intuitive as modern-day text editors. However, if you do invest the time to learn vim, it can be extremely powerful for a developer. This is why vim has a huge community. This community is so large that developers will even make plug-ins for popular IDEs and text editors to emulate the vim experience.
2. vtop
top is a very common command that is used within the terminal to display information about processes that your system has running and general information about the memory and CPU usage of your machine. If you have ever used top, it can be a little confusing to look at. So how can we make this information a little easier…
