9 Fun Command-Line Tools to Make Your Life Easier

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This head honcho is a wonderful source for finding new cool things people are building every day.

Function: Discover trending Github projects, filter by language, time (day, week, month), topic, and more.

2.

This command-line tool zooms you into the future

Function: Generate images from text.

It uses OpenAI’s CLIP image re-ranking model and Siren.While it is not as impressive as OpenAI’s , it can be fun to play with.

Often times you get the impression or essence of what you want rather than a precise version of it.

After you install it with:

pip install deep-daze

All you have to do is:

imagine "a potato dreaming on the beach"

And you can get even better results with:

imagine "a potato dreaming on the beach" --deeper

If you’ve got more power, you can increase layers for better results:

imagine "stranger in strange lands" --num-layers 32

Limitations: This one can be slow depending on how powerful your computer is.Currently there are several projects trying to replicate DALL-E, here’s .

3.

Function: Fetch Stack Overflow results whenever an exception is thrown.

Limitations: Python only

4.

Function: A modern alternative to ls. List files in a beautiful way:

5. 

Function: Simple interactive filtration/search tool for the command line.

If like me you’ve ever been frustrated that the command line does not have some sort of auto-complete or fuzzy match, Peco is the answer.

Function: Highlight differences in code

As the creator Jeff points out, your terminal can display color but a lot of diff tools don’t use it. icdiff highlights those differences.Limitations: only available on Mac/Linux.

7.

Function: With ack, you can search a directory of source code files for text inside the code, from inside the terminal, and get pretty formatted code segments in your terminal.

It’s:1. Conveniently easy2. FastInstead of typing:

$ grep pattern $(find . -type f | grep -v '\.git')

You can type:

$ ack pattern

Here’s from Cameron Pope on why you should use it.You can install it .

8.

Function: Interactive theme selection for the terminal.

9.

Function: Run Python commands in the shell.

This can be handy if you want to do something quick in the terminal that integrates Python.For example, here’s a line that gets the file formats in a directory and sorts them by most common:

ls | pyp ‘Path(x).suffix’ | pyp ‘Counter([line for line in lines if line != “”]).most_common()’

Result:(‘.wav’, 9)(‘.py’, 4)(‘.mp3’, 1)(‘.zip’, 1)

Resources

All the choices above in a glance: