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Stefan Natter 🇦🇹👨🏻‍💻
Stefan Natter 🇦🇹👨🏻‍💻

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Three CLI Tools I use every day [Week 31/2020 in Review]

#github #twitter #cli #books

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Hello 👋🏻.

Welcome to my "Week in Review" series. Each week I will share what I discovered, learned, and tested with you.

Today I am gonna show you CLI tools I use on a daily basis. They help me a lot during development.

Let's jump right into it.

Highlights

Before we get to the key topic, let's look at one awesome highlight from my Twitter feed.

Astrit nominated me for the GitHub Stars Programm. What an honor 😅. Thank you very much, my friend.

Catalin released his ebook "Improve Your Online Presence" - that was definitely a highlight of last week.

Three CLI Tools I use every day

There are probably more than these CLI tools I use every day, but I want to show you these three: asdf, thefuck, gh.

asdf

asdf is the version manager for macOS. It can manage more than just node (nvm), yarn (yvm), or python (pyenv). Their list of plugins is large. If you switch a lot between projects with different versions, it saves you some keystrokes and headaches.

Installing asdf is easy, just run:

brew install asdf

# update asdf with
brew upgrade asdf
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Now you need to add asdf to your shell by adding the following to ~/.zshrc or ~/.bash_profile:

. $(brew --prefix asdf)/asdf.sh
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Let's say you want to install node with the version 12.14.1:

asdf plugin add nodejs
asdf install nodejs 12.14.1
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Now you have nodejs available with this version on your system. If you want to use this version in one of your projects add a .tool-versions file in the project's root folder It can look like this:

nodejs 12.14.1
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This would now tell asdf to automatically load nodejs with the version 12.14.1. That's it.

I removed all other version managers and only use asdf now. You can read more about it on asdf-vm.com.

thefuck

How many times have you entered a command in your terminal, just to get an error message because your command includes a typo? It happened quite often to me in the beginning. I could get angry when that happened and say "f**k" sometimes.

One day a friend asked me if I already knew the tool of the same name. I said no but immediately googled it.

After reading the docs I had to install this. Now every time I have a typo I just write fuck, hit enter again and the tool corrects my mistake. It just works and saves time.

Does this sound familiar to you? You create a new branch with git checkout -b feature/awesome. You change some code and commit it. Now you want to push your changes with git push. Git tells you that there is no branch on origin and you need to create one first. In the past, I copied git push --set-upstream origin feature/awesome manually every time and pushed it again. Now I just enter fuck and hit enter without leaving my keyboard!

gh

gh is GitHub’s official command-line tool. Once installed (with e.g. brew install github/gh/gh, see other OS guides) you can run commands from your terminal to create pull requests, issues or repositories within seconds. The following commands are available.

  • gh pr [status, list, view, checkout, create]
  • gh issue [status, list, view, create]
  • gh repo [view, create, clone, fork]
  • gh config [get, set]
  • gh help

This was already helpful to me on many occasions.

What are some CLI tools you use? Let me know in the comments, please.

📗 Books

I finished reading "Clean Code" by Robert "Uncle Bob" C. Martin. The book is well structured and gets to the point very quickly. The individual Dos and Don'ts are understandable and comprehensible. I recommend everyone to browse through this bestseller. It pays off in my opinion.

Furthermore, Catalin released his ebook "Improve Your Online Presence". It covers lots of tips about how to improve your social media skills. I wrote a book review about it.

What are you reading? Share your recommendations in the comments below. 🙏🏻

⛓ Links of the Week

  • Bannerbear offers a simple API that auto-generates social media visuals, e-commerce banners, and more. You can create Banners for Medium and Twitter for free. The first 50 custom images are free (Pricing).
  • Create Medium posts with Markdown2Medium in seconds.
  • I am a huge fan of Sizzy, the browser for developers. In an interesting talk with Bernd Artmüller he showed me Polypane. It looks similar to Sizzy from what I've seen so far. Both can be a life-saver when it comes to responsive web design. Test and build things faster with either of them.
  • Do you want to add comments to your website? Either you use the built-in comment system for your CMS (e.g. WordPress), Disqus or you try one of these alternatives: Commento or utterances. Commento promises to be a privacy-focused commenting software, whereas utteranc.es stores the comments in public GitHub repository.
  • Write and publish Twitter threads without any hassle with Chirr App. I used this tool and can recommend it. It's free for publishing Threads and works.
  • Do you like Netflix sliders as I do? Do you want to have a similar slider on your own website? You do? Then "How to implement Netflix slider with React and hooks" written by Patryk Andrzejewski is for you. He explains it step-by-step how you can create your own Netflix-like slider with React.
  • Speaking about sliders, SwiperJS is a solid solution for your next slider.
  • Dan published a fancy button with animation on CodePen.
  • Wanna know how many people visited your GitHub or Notion pages? Then HITS is for you.
  • VS Code is my IDE of choice and so I am constantly looking for ways to improve it, my workflow, and productivity. Reading "How to Configure VS Code Like a Pro" introduced me to an interesting use-case for tasks.json. You can automatically run tasks when you start VS Code. I did not know that but have some use case for it (e.g. automatically run yarn install when I open the project).
  • Do you feel like writing too complex code? Analyze your code with CodeMetrics and you will know. :)
  • and another link talking about VS Code: Codetour. Did you know you can create onboarding codetours for contributors? I have not used it yet, but I can think of some use-cases already. This can be helpful for both public and closed-source repositories.
  • I am preparing an article about "how to handle, optimize and use SVGs in a React app" (as promised on Twitter). During my research, I read this interesting article "Using web fonts with SASS and Webpack" which might help one of you too.

🐦 Tweets of the Week











This is it for week 31/20.

See you next week - thank you. 👋🏻

Stefan

If you like this article, chances are you will like my newsletter too. 🚀

Let's stay connected on Twitter and LinkedIn.

This post includes affiliate links; I may receive compensation if you purchase products or services from the different links provided in this article.

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