Originally posted on my old blog

tldr

The. Best. Documentation. Tool. Ever. Seriously. Instead of pulling up a web browser, searching for the command, and scrolling through pages of documentation, you can instead use tldr to get most common use cases for a command. Sure, maybe 10% your particular use or flag won’t be on there, but it’s a great quick-and-dirty way to get a refresher about unfamiliar commands.

fzf

Like find but better and more powerful. For instance, pacman -Qq | fzf --preview 'pacman -Qil {}' --layout=reverse --bind 'enter:execute(pacman -Qil {} | less)' will start up cool two-panel search for your (Arch) system’s packages. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg; there’s so much more you can do with fzf

convert

No need to upload your images to sketchy websites who could steal your data in order to do image conversions. Imagemagick’s convert tool has got your back. It’s just convert image.jpg image.png, or you can also throw in some flags to resize the images and do other kinds of manipulation. It’s magic! Or should I say “magick”?

last

Ever wanted to know your system’s installation date, or even better, the full history of shutdowns and reboots? Well, last can help. Typically found in the util-linux package, it will faithfully log every boot and shutdown. According to last my system was “born” on Thursday September, 3rd 22:18:55 2020. Great to know, so I can celebrate its cake day next year!