Skip to main content

Awesome Command-line Tools

I've just re-installed my Ubuntu Linux partition and I'm loving the Gnome 3 Shell (way better than Unity) but that will be a later post. This post is about command line utilities that I install right away on my Ubuntu box. You'll notice something right away about them.


1. htop -- System Monitor


Htop is the more easy on the eyes version of top. A incredible valuable utility is like a system monitor for the command line. Perfect for figuring out what process crashed your X-session, and killing that process.


2. mc (aka midnight commander) -- File Manager


Midnight commander is a file manager that is aware of the mouse, so you can navigate the file structure. It's the easiest way to manage files from the command line or see how a folder structure is laid out.

3. jed -- Text Editor


In the Unix world there are two kinds of people: vi people and emacs people. These are the two main text editors for the terminal from the days of old. Vi now vim (vi - improved) is light and fast, while Emacs is huge and powerful. I remember when days trying to get my head around vi, someone introduced me to emacs. It was so much easier for me. Now I wanted to get it back on my computer but it's huge, and therefore slow. And here comes jed, looks fantastic and I'm looking forward to learning emacs again.


Did you notice what they all had in common? A colorful terminal is so much cooler I think. :)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Contrasting Styles of Writing: English vs. Spanish

There is interestingly enough a big difference between what's considered good writing in Spanish and English . V.S. Naipul winner of the 2001 Nobel prize for literature publish an article on writing . In it he emphasizes the use of short clear sentences and encourages the lack of adjectives and adverbs. Essentially he pushes the writer to abandon florid language and master spartan communication . This is a desired feature of English prose , where short clipped sentences are the norm and seamlessly flow into a paragraph. In English prose the paragraph is the unit the writer cares about the most. This is not the case in Spanish where whole short stories (I'm thinking this was Gabriel Garcia Marquez but maybe it was Cortázar) are written in one sentence. Something so difficult to do in English that the expert translator could best manage to encapsulate the tale in two sentences. The florid language is what is considered good writing in Spani...
3 comments
Read more

Building my own home.

I've decided. I want to build my own home. There is something special about building your own things. I built a desk for my tiny room when I first moved to L.A. My room was so small that I had to sit on the bed to use the computer so I build a high desk so I could sit on the bed and work on the computer. My roommate Trentity helped me cut the ply-wood to the right side. I still have that desk. It now sits on the living room covered by a cloth hiding the surplus of costume parts my current roommate Sean uses in his creations. Learning to build and fix things continue. And the feeling of satisfaction from fixing even small things is great. So a few years ago I heard on the NPR program the Story about a couple of educators that moved to a tent in their back-yard so they could rent their house and afford to send their kids to college. They had a special type of tent called a yurt and cooked and showered in an RV they had parked next to it. I thought I could do that. Housing in Lo...
2 comments
Read more

My Fake Resume

Inspired by the over aggrandized bio of Joseph Rakofsky I want to write my own. If you don't know who he is; Joseph Rakofsky is a lawyer who earned a mistrial for a criminal client due to his (alleged) incompetence as reported on the Washington Post . There has been quite a few commentaries on his "Streisand-house" approach of suing all the bloggers and even the Washington Post and American Bar Association for reporting his (alleged) ineptitude. ("Streisand-house" is what happened to Barbara Streisand who wanted to have a picture of her mansion removed from the internet and she sued to have it removed. Unfortunately suing requires the filing of public documents with a picture of her house. The lawsuit had the direct opposite effect it intended. Everybody now could see legally, since it was a public document, a picture of her house.) But all that internet gossip aside I'm most impressed by his resume. Here is a quote from the website: Prior t...
1 comment
Read more