Shrijal Acharya

Posted on Nov 29, 2023

✨Be a 10X Linux User with these tools 😎💫

#opensource #programming #productivity #webdev

TL;DR

This article lists six great tools for developers to install on their Linux machines. 🎉

Feel free to explore these tools, and star these repositories. Opensource projects need your help! 🙏🏻

Are you ready to become a 10X Linux user? 🧠 Just kidding, you will not be, 😆 but these tools can definitely speed up your daily workloads. 🏃🏻‍♂️💨

1. Ngrok

💡 Securely expose local servers online.

Ngrok helps create a public URL 🌐 for your local web server so you can share your work-in-progress with teammates, clients, or the world. 🌍

Just by running a simple command, Ngrok spins up a secure tunnel from a public endpoint to your computer. This lets you test websites, apps, and APIs on your localhost without having to deploy anything.

Ngrok supports HTTP and TCP traffic so you can tunnel almost anything 🤯 - web servers, or even databases indirectly. It also offers useful features like custom subdomains and replaying/inspecting traffic.

Ngrok helps in these major areas:

Temporarily share a website that is only running on your development machine 🖥️.

Develop any services that consume webhooks 🪝.

Debug 🧑‍💻 a web service by inspecting web traffic.

✨ I don't use this tool very often, but I remember I used this tool for the very first time a few years back to show my friend the website I had created locally.

🌟 ngrok on GitHub

2. fzf

💡 A command-line fuzzy finder.

Fzf is a useful tool for anyone who spends a lot of time working in the terminal 🖥️. It acts as a fuzzy finder, allowing you to quickly search 🔍 and filter through data lists like files, command history, git commits, and more.

Here's how it works. When you run an fzf command, it instantly filters the list below as you type to show only matching results.

Here's a possible use case. 😯

ls -la | fzf

This interactive approach makes it fast and easy to find what you're looking for, even on long lists. Fuzzy matching means it will find partial matches, so you don't have to type the full name. 🤯

🌟 fzf on GitHub

3. Z

💡 Jump around directories without knowing the entire path.

Have you ever been working on a project with a deeply nested folder structure and had to constantly type out long directory 📂 paths using the cd command? Z solves that problem. 😉

Once you install and start using Z, it tracks the directories you access most often. Then, instead of typing the full path, you can enter a short name to instantly jump 🦘 to that folder.

Z uses two factors to determine which directories to track for you: how frequently you access a folder and how recently you accessed it.

So the folders you use the most will get the shortest names.

🌟 Z on GitHub

4. Ranger

💡 A VIM-inspired file manager for the console.

Ranger is a vim-inspired file manager 👮🏻 with a console interface. It provides an easy-to-use and efficient way to navigate and view the file system.

Some major features of Ranger are:

Multi-column ✨ display

Preview 📂 of the selected file/directory

Common file operations (create/chmod/copy/delete/...)

Renaming multiple files at once

VIM-like console and hotkeys ⌨️

🌟 Ranger on GitHub

5. Ncdu

💡 Review files and the disk space being used on Linux systems.

Ncdu is a useful command line tool that helps you manage your disk space efficiently.

It shows you a visual representation of how space is used on your disk drives, making it easy to identify large files and folders that are taking up the most space.

When you run Ncdu, it scans 🔍 your file system and displays an interactive list in your terminal, showing you each folder on your disk drives and how much space they are using. You can navigate this list to drill down and see the space usage of subfolders 📂.

Its simple interface makes it easy to use yet powerful for analyzing your disk usage and optimizing your storage.

If you struggle with your disk space 💾 filling up, Ncdu can be a handy tool to identify the culprits and take action. 👮🏻

6. Exa - Good to have

💡 Colorful replacement of ls command.

🚨 Exa is now unmaintained, use eza. It is a fork of exa with a couple of features added. But I am still using Exa and it works pretty fine. They are pretty much the same.

Exa is a modern replacement for the old ls command that you use in the terminal to list files and folders. It gives you a more colorful 🎨, detailed, and easy-to-read listing of the files in your current directory.

When you run exa instead of ls, you'll see a few nice improvements. First, it color codes the file types using different colors and icons (enable or disable) 💬 making it easier to visually distinguish files at a glance.

It also shows you extra information like file permissions, owners, sizes, and more.

🌟 Exa on GitHub

If you think of any other handy tools that I haven't covered in this article, please share them in the comments section below. 👇🏻

So, that is it for this article. Thank you so much for reading! 🎉🫡

Shrijal Acharya

Full Stack SDE • Open-Source Contributor • Collaborator @Oppia 🤝

Top comments (54)

Christian Ledermann • Nov 29 '23

McFly McFly replaces your default ctrl-r shell history search with an intelligent search engine that takes into account your working directory and the context of recently executed commands. McFly's suggestions are prioritized in real time with a small neural network.
Oh My ZSH! Unleash your terminal like never before.

Dmitri Don • Nov 29 '23

Can you provide few use cases where Oh My ZSH unleashes the terminal like never before? :) I installed it, but only pressing Y to update it every time i start the terminal... Never had time to research why I really installed it, but someone recommended to get it :)

Joao L. • Nov 30 '23

There's many little things, but one of the best quality of life improvements of zsh is the vastly improved tab-completion.

Dmitri Don • Nov 30 '23

Ok, tried to press Tab twice, got selectable list of directories... ok, pretty cool, but only for one level, after selecting on directory, had to double Tab again for the next level....

Christian Ledermann • Nov 29 '23

have a look at: pythonbytes.fm/episodes/show/281/o...

Ben Sinclair • Nov 30 '23

It's important to note that if you use ngrok in your job, you need to pay for a license per-seat.

I've personally not seen the appeal of exa beyond its git integration. Everything else people talk about it doing is done by GNU grep anyway!

Shrijal Acharya • Dec 1 '23

About Exa, I use it with an alias, so I don't need to use the command exa ..., I just use ls as I used to, and it will use exa under the hood. Exa's output looks appealing and is good to work with, and the git integration is a cherry on top.

alias ls='exa -al --color=always --group-directories-first'
alias la='exa -a --color=always --group-directories-first'
alias ll='exa -l --color=always --group-directories-first'
alias lla='exa -la --color=always --group-directories-first'

Ben Sinclair • Dec 1 '23 • Edited

Those arguments are all copied from GNU ls anyway, so you could do the same thing with alias ls='ls -al --color=always --group-directories-first.
Is there a difference in the output that couldn't be configured with flags or setting environment variables like LSCOLORS, etc.?

And what's the difference between ls and lla?

Shrijal Acharya • Dec 3 '23

That's a customization specific to me. Just ignore that. I use ls and lla interchangeably sometimes. 🥴

𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️ • Nov 30 '23

One tool that has helped me enormously with keeping my mind on the right topic is atuin, which makes it a lot easier to find old commands, so instead of trying to sift through my history and losing track of my actual task, I can just fuzzy-find stuff without wasting too much thought of it.

And speaking of tasks, I've recently started using taskwarrior and timewarrior to track what needs to be done and how much time I spend on it. I even have it integrated into my zsh prompt so any active task is listed there because otherwise I'd just get distracted and leave the timer running while doing something completely unrelated.

Shrijal Acharya • Nov 30 '23 • Edited

My way of searching history was to use hs | fzf, where hs is an alias for the history command. Atuin is definitely going to come in handy. I am a WSL guy, and for now, my approach works well for me. I don't want to add too many tools to the system as it's already a bit slower.

Nicholas Drone • Nov 29 '23

The last 2 just seem to pretty up the existing commands, I probably won't use since the flags are hardcoded in my brain from years of use. Instead of Z I use autojump github.com/wting/autojump may not have all the features of Z but I'm commonly somewhere in my home directory anyway.

Shrijal Acharya • Nov 30 '23

autojump definitely seems to be a great alternative to z. z seems to be unmaintained for years. I guess it's time to switch for me as well. I am surprised they both have the same star count. 😆

Sebastian Christopher • Nov 30 '23 • Edited

If anyone is interested there is also zoxide 💿 And it looks to be active maintained, and build in Rust.

Igor Zibarev • Dec 2 '23

I second this, zoxide is just superior to z, autojump, and else.

Prayson Wilfred Daniel • Nov 30 '23

Nice 👌🏾. I found bat, cat with wings, enriching my terminal life.

Shrijal Acharya • Nov 30 '23

Such a handy tool. Added to my toolkit. Now, no more 'cat' only 'bat'. 😆

Pxlmastr • Nov 29 '23

Great post! I personally use both fd and fzf in my workflow, so glad to see that fzf is up there.

Shrijal Acharya • Nov 30 '23

fzf is a pretty handy little tool that definitely speeds up my daily workflow. It had to be mentioned! 😉

𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️ • Nov 30 '23

I only started using fzf sometime around early 2023 but it's already become a central part of how I use linux.

When I want to open a project, I just type p projectname which lists all git repos in my $HOME/workspace and lets me fuzzy-find the one I want. Then I edit a file by typing e filename which does the same but for files and opens them in nvim. I even use it to check out git branches. Great tool! 👍💖

Shrijal Acharya • Nov 30 '23

fzf is a must-have gem for any Linux user I guess. 😉

Riccardo Venturini • Dec 2 '23 • Edited

You should try this awesome alias (require bat):

alias fzf='fzf --preview "bat --color=always --style=header,grid --line-range :500 {}"'

Shrijal Acharya • Dec 3 '23

Great one! Added.

Athreya aka Maneshwar • Dec 3 '23 • Edited

I like localtunnel more, which gives you the flexibility to make your subdomain.

Shrijal Acharya • Dec 3 '23

I've never tried that before. I guess I need to give it a try. Thank you for sharing!

Nathan S.R. • Dec 2 '23

Nice List. Thanks for the thoughtful composition.

Shrijal Acharya • Dec 3 '23

Glad I could help! 🙌

Paul Isaris • Dec 2 '23

Very nice list, actually helpful tools! Thanks!

Shrijal Acharya • Dec 3 '23

🙌

Grant Carthew • Dec 1 '23

Exa was good, replaced with github.com/lsd-rs/lsd

Shrijal Acharya • Dec 3 '23

So many alternatives! 🥴 Exa, Eza, or LSD

Alex (The Engineering Bolt) ⚡ • Nov 29 '23

@shricodev what service are you using to generate these animated hero images. Love them, they look really cool!

Shrijal Acharya • Nov 29 '23

For the image I use lexica.art. It contains AI stock images and I pick one that suits the blog title. For the animation leiapix works absolutely perfectly. I hope this helps you and maybe someone who has the same question.