Modern Shell Tools

Shell Tools

All these are quite nice if you're working with a bare shell, or an uncustomized shell. However, in this day and age, there's a lot of new commands and tools to enhance your terminal experiences.

Finding out how to use commands and installing them

Before we get started with tools, we need to know how to install them and also how to learn what they do. For commands, we can often pass in flags to tell the program how we want it to run. One of the universal flags is the --help flag.

chun@legion:~$ cat --help

To install a program, we often times use what is known as a package manager. This allows us to search and install packages without having to googling the tool and trying to find the correct downloadable file

If you're on Linux or WSL, you should have a package manager installed. If you're on Ubuntu/Debian-based distros, this should be apt. If you're on anything else, you should try and figure out what the package manager is based on your distro.

If you're on MacOS, you'll need to install brew:

Now to install a program, you can just do:

You will need to update the package lists before installing a package!

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install <package-name>

Finding Files

sudo apt-get install fzf

Once installed, do:

fzf stands for fuzzy finder. It allows you to find anything with a fuzzy search (you can make spelling errors). If you just run fzf, it will do a fuzzy find on your current directory

fzf

But we can do so much more than that! To do so, we need to add some keybindings by running this command:

eval "$(fzf --bash)"

Now try out these new keybindings:

  • CTRL-T - Paste the selected files and directories onto the command-line

  • CTRL-R - Paste the selected command from history onto the command-line

  • ALT-C - cd into the selected directory

Now notice that if you quit the terminal or start a new terminal, these keybindings won't be available. To make the change permanent, we need to save it into a config file. For bash, this config file is is at ~/.bashrc

nano ~/.bashrc

## Inside the editor, add this line
eval "$(fzf --bash)"

Finding code or text

So we can find specific files and directories, but what about finding specific contents within a file? ripgrep is a program that aims to solve this.

sudo apt-get install ripgrep
# Find all python files where I used the requests library
rg -t py 'import requests'
# Find all files (including hidden files) without a shebang line
rg -u --files-without-match "^#\!"
# Find all matches of foo and print the following 5 lines
rg foo -A 5
# Print statistics of matches (# of matched lines and files )
rg --stats PATTERN

Fast directory navigation

It is quite troublesome so jump around directories, especially if you're copying something, or the path is really, really, really long. A good way around this is to have a program guess what directory you want to jump to based on keywords and frequency of which directory you jump to! That is exactly what zoxide does.

curl -sSfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide/main/install.sh | sh

You can use z to jump to directories, similar to how you use cd. For example, if you have a directory you frequently go to, like:

 /home/user/downloads/temp_dir/funny_project

You could do something like z funny to jump into it.

If all you want to do is learn how to use the terminal, you can just stop here! The next section goes above an beyond and talks about how you can build your own scripts and commands which you can then run.

PreviousIntroduction to the TerminalNextShell Scripting

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