pv, which is like cat, simply copying files or stdin to stdout, but prints statistics to the terminal.

A related tip: dd isn’t special in the way most people use it. This works too, if you’re root: pv my-fav-distro.iso > /dev/sdc

I really like jless. You can pipe the JSON output of a cURL command into it and it displays it in a really nice, easy to read way with collapsible arrays and objects.

Newsboat, an RSS reader https://newsboat.org/

In Bash, I like to use cdargs

sudo apt-get install cdargs

It allows you to set up shortcuts on the fly,

cv sdbackup

rather than cd /media/user/Backup Plus/ MyFiles/current/sdbackup

cv with no argument will give you a list to select from current shortcuts

My answers (mostly running in powershell - not that it makes much of a difference!)

Rust-based utilities I couldn’t live without:

• fd (fd-find) for finding my files
• rg (ripgrep) for string searches
• sd (sed) for search and replace
• dust (dust) for information about my directories
• lsd (aliased to ls or l) for replacing Dir
• bat (better cat) - for when the help pages are too long

Other stuff I love:

• htop - I just learned you can run this in WSL to see all your system cores. It’s pretty!
• nvim - obviously. The best vim. Even works in VSCode

I’m a pretty big fan of icdiff. This utility allows you to compare two files to see what has been added or removed by using colorful fonts to highlight values.

https://github.com/jeffkaufman/icdiff

• scoop - closest to apt on Windows
• yt-dlp - active fork of youtube-dl
• neofetch - System information display
• winfetch - Same as neofetch, but for windows
• pandoc - Ultimate converter
• ffmpeg - must have tool
• taskwarrior - best task manager imho

Taskwarrior.

I write a lot of bash scripts that end up running in automation in some fashion.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -euxo pipefail

Is pretty standard for me.

-e exit on error

-o pipefail exit on pipeline fail

-u error on unset variables

-x trace

if you spend a lot of time in the shell, i like using the following for easier directory traversal:

• fzf and its shell bindings for fuzzy-matching arguments
• z for jumping to “frecent” directories
• zsh-z (a native zsh port of z)
• bd for going back directories

and some zsh settings which make cd silently act like pushd/popd:

# autopushd         : make cd act like pushd (alias doesn't work properly)
# pushdminus        : use -1 instead of +1
# pushdsilent       : prevents printing stack on each cd
# pushdtohome       : `pushd` to ~/
# pushdignoredups   : dont add duplicates to stack

Always partial to yq and jq. No easier way to interact with kubernetes outputs on the fly.