Which Linux command or utility is simple, powerful, and surprisingly unknown to many people or used less often?
This could be a command or a piece of software or an application.
For example I’m surprised to find that many people are unaware of Caddy, a very simple web server that can make setting up a reverse proxy incredibly easy.
Another example is fzf. Many people overlook this, a fast command-line fuzzy finder. It’s versatile for searching files, directories, or even shell history with minimal effort.
The mouse.
Bring on the downvotes. 🎉
Hey, still the quickest way to copy any damn text from a terminal elsewhere is with the mouse. Tmux is a joke for this.
Why can’t terminal emulators just make this easy
Wezterm has made this easy : shift + ctrl + x and your in vim motion moving all over with yank line or word or visual mode. It’s super awesome! I never touch my mouse. You can also remap the keymap of course.
nano was and still is vital to me learning and using linux, I will not learn how to use vim so if the distro forces it to be default im not using it.
Why is editing text so convoluted for seemingly no reason… also hate that vim must be used for certain files.
It’s for people to memorize hundreds of arcane shortcuts and shit so they can feel like a smug hacker and gloat over the rest of us using other editors and getting just as much done as they are.
Also for graybeards that haven’t realized it’s not 1985 anymore.
For the average user you’re definitely right, but I will say for the sysadmin of headless systems, having a powerful cli editor is a godsend. While it may seem arcane and unnecessary, learning vim is easier than managing remote x or sshfs or copying files to and from a system.
I didn’t learn vim to be a contrarian; I learned it because it seemed (and still seems to be) the path of least resistance for many workflows.
I’ve used Vim for some pretty non-nerdy stuff. Like ripping my DVD collection, when I got to the TV section I had a lot of file names to modify in bulk, and Vim let me do that. Also guitar tablature, the ability to edit plaintext both horizontally and vertically is surprisingly handy. Just having a macro to be able to add a bar line saves a shocking amount of time.
It’s for people that don’t want a big bulky IDE and are willing to put a little work in to get used to it. I do all my coding in the terminal with vim and tmux and I like the simplicity and that with two dotfiles I can migrate my whole development environment to whatever PC, server or RaspberryPi that I need.
Wow, who hurt you? Vim is fun, and just because you can make things work without it doesn’t mean it has no practical benefit. It’s nice to have an editor as powerful as an IDE that doesn’t require a graphical environment.
Hundreds of shortcuts is emacs, by the way. A major perk of modal editing and the vi editing language is that you can compose relatively few operations to accomplish many tasks rather than memorizing lots of more complex and specific shortcuts.
I used nano when I started but now I am using vim for one year already. I’d recommend taking a few days where you only use vim and I think you will see why people like it. With a few motions you can be much faster than you would be in Nano.
one of my favorite linux youtubers is named vimjoyer so maybe one day I will try to learn it
Nano is hella confusing too. Since when is ^ = Ctrl?
And why dont they tell you that Ctrl+S Ctrl+C Ctrl+X works?
As for why: arbitrary choice, they just needed a printable character they could show on screen, for when people pressed it and the terminal echoed it back out to them.
Cant remember exactly but it had something to do with a file relating to sudo and it only was allowed to be edited with a vim style editor.
There’s a separate command called visudo for this purpose.
You CAN use any ol’ text editor but visudo has built-in validation specific to the sudoers file. This is helpful because sudoers syntax is unique and arcane, and errors are potentially quite harmful.
Yeah, to this day vim still isn’t intuitive for me, so I just use nano as it’s either often included or simple to install on most Distros.
Unless a script is hardcoded for vim I haven’t had to use it.
vim isn’t required for any files, you just followed online tutorials for how to edit those files instead of RTFM
terminal text editing is convoluted because it has to strike a balance between figuring out when a keypress is part of the text you’re typing, vs when it’s a command you’re using, and making sure that all the editor commands the designer wanted are accessible.
vim is great because it allows for thousands more editing commands and macros, and much more customization of the editor, up to allowing plugins that emulate other functionality. As it stands, my setup basically functions as a full, lightweight-ish, multi-language IDE that rivals Emacs or Visual Studio.
On top of all that, I don’t have to move my hands away from the homerow of keys to navigate or edit, which may not seem like much, but adds up to a lot of avoid typos and time saved from moving my hands to reach the arrows/delete/home/end/pgup/pgdn.
Some examples:
h, j,k,l move left, down, up, and right respectively, but they can be combined with a number to move that many rows or columns; e.g. 6j will move down 6 rows
dd deletes a line, but using a number + d + a movement will delete that many characters/lines in the path of the cursor: e.g. 34dl will delete 34 characters to the right of the cursor, 12dk will delete 12 lines up.
gg will take you to the first line, G will take you to the last, and number + either will take you to that line: e.g. 3275gg or 3275G will take you to line 3275
and finally you can use /text or regex pattern you want to search for and Enter to search the document for the first occurence below your current location, and then use n to search for the next occurence, or N to search for the previous
That doesn’t even scratch the surface (that’s just the cheatsheet, which only scratches the surface), but if you can get a handle on only what I’ve said, and switching between input and command mode (i and Esc respectively), the speedup to navigation alone will make it seem more sensible.
And as always, don’t forget to :wq (write to file and quit)
Underrated
Both linked projects have over 60k+ stars on GitHub
Pick one
A few that I use every day:
- Fish shell
- Starship.rs
- Broot (a brilliant filesystem navigator)
- Helix editor (My favorite editor / IDE, truly the successor to vim IMO)
- Topgrade (updates everything)
Fish is a replacement of bash that’s a bit more user friendly (has some cool auto completion features out of the box and more sane behaviour like handling of spaces when expanding variables). I personally started to use nutshell recently but unlike fish it’s very different from bash.
Starship is a “prompt” for various shells (that bit of text in terminal before you enter the command that shows current user and directory in bash). I haven’t used it but AFAIK it has many features like showing current time, integration with git, etc.
Yep, here’s my Starship prompt, for example:
So, I have it configured to show:
- the exit code of the last command (if it’s non-zero),
- the duration of the last command (if it’s longer than 2 seconds),
- the time (when the last command ended),
- the current directory,
- the current Git branch, and it also shows some Git status information, for example the
$means I have something stashed, - and finally the technology in use in a repository/directory, so in this case that repo uses Rust and the compiler version is 1.83.
Helix is a terminal based text editor. It’s much like vim / neovim, but unlike those editors it’s good to go right out of the box, no configuration or plugins needed to make it work well.
Topgrade is one I haven’t used, but it looks like its intended purpose is to let you upgrade your apps with one command, even if you use multiple different package managers (I.e. if you were on Ubuntu, you could use it to upgrade your apt packages, at the same time as your snap packages, as well as flatpak, nix, and homebrew if you’ve added those.)
I heard about helix from you and I’ve used it for a year and a half or so now, it’s by far the best editor I’ve used so far and I can definitely vouch for it
I’ve actually been testing with fish recently coming from zsh, though I might wait until 4.0 fully releases before I make a more conclusive decision to move or not.
With that said, I remember looking through omf themes and stumbled onto Starship that branched off one of the themes and really liked the concept.
One thing that holds people back sometimes is that bash scripts that set environment variables don’t work by default. https://github.com/edc/bass is an easy solution
Once Helix gets plugin support and someone makes a Clojure REPL plugin as good as Conjure I am never touching vim again!
It does have clojure lsp support, but you’ll probably have to use a command line for most repls.
Yeah the clojure lsp support is top notch, but there being no support for “jacking in” to a repl is the big thing keeping me from using helix full time. There’s a way of doing it if you use kitty, but it’s pretty janky.
Bat, a cat alternative.
Lsd, an ls alternative.
Procs, a ps alternative.
Renane, because it’s great.
