Let’s talk CLI/TUI and Developer Workflows!

Wonderful day!

@RareBird15@allovertheplace.ca , I am sorry, but just in case, the Communities/Member should have the following syntax, if required:
- !community@instance.test
- @member@instance.test

Meanwhile, I hope you’ll find what your you’re looking for, of course!

I’ve been enjoying rmpc, a tui front end for mpd.

I spend a lot of time in k9s, the TUI used to interface with kubernetes clusters

• tldr (aka tealdeer) for quick command usage examples

• bat (aka batcat) for most uses of less/more/cat

• difft (aka difftastic) which I’ve just learnt about here/here. Use in git diff by running $ git config --global diff.external difft

• btm (aka bottom) for viewing processes & system status

• This code in my .bashrc for colored man output:

I’m on my phone, but here’s what I’m using off the top of my head

Helix editor

Yazi - file browser

Aichat

Juju - Jutusu Scm

Ec - conflict resolver

Mergiraf - ast aware conflict resolver

Jiq - jq tui

Radicle - self hosted code forge

Bat - better cat

Fish shell

Nushell

Sqlit - db browser

Zoxide - directory changer

Scooter - find/replace

Mole - Mac cleaner

Devenv - per project dependencies and scripts

Lix - nix client ( largest package manager, great for testing tools too)

Home-manager

Television - fuzzy finder with a nixpkgs plugin

@RareBird15 @programming @linux @selfhosted Can't believe nobody has mentioned top/btop/htop.

Mostly Linux built-in commands like grep, awk, and cat when working with bash scripts

For more serious projects that rely on a CLI interface, tools that allow for ANSI codes to be used. For example, I use prompt_toolkit (for actual menus) and framed_text (for ANSI messages and yes, this is something I made) for my Python projects.

git is my main project branch program. It’s just too good to pass up.

I don’t really use CLI/TUI text editors other than quick edits over SSH when I’m not at my PC. For that, I use neovim with nvchad, or nano.

A few handy commands that aren’t in the traditional unix kit…

$ whatis ffmpeg lsblk mmv nc pv wcurl wrestool xxd
ffmpeg (1)           - ffmpeg media converter
lsblk (8)            - list block devices
mmv (1)              - move/copy/link multiple files by wildcard patterns
nc (1)               - arbitrary TCP and UDP connections and listens
pv (1)               - monitor the progress of data through a pipe
wcurl (1)            - a simple wrapper around curl to easily download files.
wrestool (1)         - extract resources from Microsoft Windows(R) binaries
xxd (1)              - make a hex dump or do the reverse.

@RareBird15 @programming @linux @selfhosted

Ones I haven’t seen mentioned (unless it came in while I was typing this).

github.com/kainctl/isd - Interactive systemd.

github.com/zellij-org/zellij - tmux alternative. Built in which-key functionality. I initially switched to it because I like large scrollback buffers and tmux was super slow at resizing window panes. Can open buffers in nvim for better search. Nicer TUI if you don’t mind a little bloat / bling.

github.com/arxanas/git-branchless - Work on stacked commits. Instead of opening PRs linerally you work on several commits at once with the expectation each commit will be a PR. Promotes smaller PRs that are easier to review to complete a feature. Often when doing that linerally you may discover a bad choice made earlier and have to reverse course and refactor. With a branchless workflow you go back and forth on commits so the final stack of PRs doesn’t include those reverse course refactors. git sl has some nice TUI graphs of your stack.

github.com/mystor/git-revise - Split, rearrange commits. Works nicely with git-branchless.

github.com/tummychow/git-absorb - Reflect changes from a commit backwards. Also works well with a branchless workflow.

If I’m honest I just develop linerally and use an AI agent/skill to restack using the 3 programs above to erase pivot / refactor points and to group logical blocks into an easy to review PR.

github.com/ymtdzzz/otel-tui - Open Telemetry viewer.

github.com/brocode/fblog - JSON Lines viewer.

github.com/aristocratos/btop - Better top.

github.com/jandedobbeleer/oh-my-posh - Terminal prompt. My daily driver.

starship.rs - Another terminal prompt. Played with a little but never got around to giving it my full attention to match my oh-my-posh setup.

rclone.org - Remote backups using my own encryption key. Supports many cloud providers.

github.com/Mic92/nix-fast-build - Not sure its really faster but has a nicer TUI.

dircolors.com - Directory listing colors in terminal output to better distinguish file types. At a glance I can distinguish read-only, executables, symlinks, directories, etc.

github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit - Git TUI. I only use in neovim though, don’t think I’ve ever run it directly.

github.com/sindrets/diffview.nvim - Better merge conflict handling in neovim.

www.lazyvim.org - Base neovim config with lots of TUI sugar.

github.com/stevearc/oil.nvim - File tree explorer in neovim with editing capabilities. Hands down the most efficient way I’ve found to normallize torrent file names. Fixing 5+ seasons of a show takes a few minutes if you know the right vim keybinds.

github.com/getsops/sops / github.com/mic92/sops-nix - Encrypt secrets in git repos.

github.com/…/fast-syntax-highlighting - Syntax highlighting as you type shell commands.

github.com/luccahuguet/yazelix - Opinionated Yazi, Helix, Zellij setup with custom patches to integrate. Looks interesting but could never get to work with nix as it keeps trying to write to store paths. They even have a flake.nix in the repo…

less - Less shitty more (terminal pager) with the options below.

export LESS="-aRix2 --use-color --mouse --wheel-lines=3"
export SYSTEMD_LESS="$LESS"

# a = search from current position
# i = case insensiti

@RareBird15 @programming @linux @selfhosted I have been playing with mise to manage all my cli tooling. It starts (for me) by being a better version of Volta for node, doing automatic node version switching whenever you try and run node in a configured project. Except it can also be configured to read configs for other node version managers like nvm, and to act like corepack to use the right npm or yarn version configured in package.json. It does that for other languages, and other tools too!

@RareBird15 @programming @linux @selfhosted A few months ago I discovered GNU parallel as I needed a way to upload a lot of files to S3 and it was taking too long. It's a great piece of software to run tasks in parallel.

textual.textualize.io - wrote my own

@RareBird15 @programming @linux @selfhosted
Ones I use pretty much daily are:
irssi, IRC client,
Profanity, XMPP client - I had to use a compile-time flag to enable encryption, so, it does support it, but, worth checking if it's enabled already if you got it as a binary from a package manager or something.,
newsboat rss/newsreader, a fork of Newsbeuter which is now unmaintained,
lynx or links, TUI web browsers
sc, a TUI spreadsheet program.
mutt, email client
cmus, music/audio player

Nushell

Emacs.

Emacs all the way

Btm - Like a task manager thing

Zellij - Like tmux, but in rust

Nushell

Yazi - File explorer

Helix - Text editor

Aside from vim or emacs text editors I’ll usually try to keep it to the gnu core utils and programs that are included with most installs just to keep things universal and simple aside from a couple shell functions and aliases for backing up files and navigating for convenience.

Today I used vim, top, ps, grep, du, sort, ls, find, rm, a backup function that suffixes a date to the filename or adds tildes if it already has one, nohup, sudo, cp, tar, unzip off the top of my dome. It’s not the same every day but pretty typical if I’m doing some ops or analysis work.

• Nushell - because open blah.json | get foo.bar.2 just works. It also just works with yaml and any other formats I want to support (you can define custom commands to support any extension you want).
• uv/fnm - good tools for Python and JS
• Starship - nice looking prompt with useful info
• zoxide/fzf - because z myproject saves enough time and effort to justify using it over cd most of the time
• Carapace as my default completer for better completions on most common tools
• Gitui - super nice git tool. I still use git directly a lot, but Gitui’s interface is more convenient for staging changes