I spent far too much of my life on a computer using the default terminal software and shell tools. Over the past year that has changed and now have a long list of tools I can’t believe I lived without:
Tmux: The terminal multiplexor. Where I used to use screen on jump boxes I wouldn’t have thought of using anything similar locally a few years ago. The main features I rely on:
Autojump: A faster way to navigate. This
tool is simply awesome. It stores your cd history then allows you to do j
pattern and it will move you into the directory you move to the most that
matches the pattern. Within hours of installing you’ll be hooked.
SCM Breeze: My life is versioned! I
spend hours a day interacting with git. Why oh why did I spend so much time
typying git commands! For example git checkout -b blah becomes gcb blah
. Another: git commit -m
"something interesting" becomes gcmsg "something intersting". Watch the gifs
on the home page to see even more powerful examples.
My repos: Allows you to mange many repos as
one. Simply enter a repo you have checked out do mr register and it will be
added to your .mrconfig. Then you can push all repos with mr push and update
all your repos with mr update. I move between a laptop, desktop and client
workstations a lot so this tool is simply life changing. Combine it with vcsh
so you can manage all your dot files as separate repos and you’re laughing.
Zsh: Stop using bash now! Then install oh-my-zsh.
Ansible: I now completely auomate the installation of my desktop and laptop. Where as I don’t think Ansible is powerful enough in the work place for managing thousands of servers it is perfect for managing my two desktops and laptop. My initial though was “Only slightly more complicated than writing shells cripts to install things but a lot more powerful”. I have recently switched from apt based distros to dnf based distros so my home automation isn’t complete but here is what I use to keep my desktops and laptop consitent: home-ansible.
Hopefully you find some of these tools as useful as I do.