Software tools

Created: Feb 25, 2020 by Pradeep Gowda Updated: Apr 05, 2024

List of programs and shell scripts that I find useful.

2014-11-26: Conkeror
2015-05-06: ccat – colourised cat. there are other ways to do it, including using pygmentize
2016-07-22: joeyespo/grip: Preview GitHub Markdown files like Readme locally before committing them.
2018-02-19: java_launcher: Helper script to treat Java programs as scripts.
2019-12-05: imgproxy – imgproxy does one thing — resizing remote images — and does it well. It works great when you need to resize multiple images on the fly to make them match your application design without preparing a ton of cached resized images or re-doing it every time the design changes. imgproxy is a Go application, ready to be installed and used in any Unix environment
2020-02-25: antonmedv/fx: Command-line tool and terminal JSON viewer 🔥
2020-02-25: antonmedv/red: Terminal log analysis tools

Meta (lists made by other people)

Chrome extensions

PriceBlink –useful for comparison shopping. I’ve saved quite a bit of money using this extension.
Personal Blocklist – filter out content farms from your searches. -Adblock Plus – A must have for all. -Send this link with Gmail – very useful to share the web links via email. Works even Google Apps domains. -MeasureIt! -JSONView – “an extension that helps you to parse and view JSON documents”. Highly recommended if you do web development -Screen Capture – screen capture, highlighting and annotation.

Safari extensions

Ghostery – block intrusive javascript.

Pandoc

pandoc is a fantastic program to convert text to various output formats.

Typcial usage: To convert a markdown formatted text file to html

$ pandoc somefile.txt -f markdown -t html --standalone -o somefile.html

See the detailed pandoc page.

Command line tools

abcde

Command line tool to rip CDs to .mp3.

Installation: $ sudo apt-get install abcde id3v2

Insert Disc #1 of a 3-cd audio book $ abcde -o mp3 -p -W 1.

bcat

bcat pipe to browser utility.

Typical usage: To see the git log.

$ git log -p --color | bcat

fd

sharkdp/fd: A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find.

gist

gist pastes code, text to [gist.github.com] from command line.

$ gist one.txt

partimage

partimage is a Linux disk imaging software. It has a curses based interface to guide you through the options.

Typical usage: make a backup of an entire HDD(say SSD/Flash of a prototype) to your desktop.

Make Image:

$ partimage -z1 save /dev/sdg1 $HOME/backup/prototype-hdd-20100707.partimg.gz

Restore:

$ partimage restore /dev/sdg1 $HOME/backup/prototype-hdd-20100707.partimg.gz

qpdf

qpdf – is a command-line program that does structural, content-preserving transformations on PDF files.

http-prompt

HTTP Prompt - An interactive command-line HTTP client

pip install http-prompt

entr

entr(1) – Run arbitrary commands when files change

ripgrep

ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern

sd

sd is an intuitive find & replace CLI.

rargs

rargs xargs + awk with pattern matching support. ls *.bak | rargs -p '(.*)\.bak' mv {0} {1}

rak

lizmat/App-Rak: 21st century grep / find / ack / ag / rg on steroids

Code tools

etsy/hound: Lightning fast code searching made easy

Database tools

dbeaver – crossplatform database manager for all popular sql dbs and some nosql dbs.

Web development tools

Data Cleaning

jq - command line json processor
HTML-XML-utils – makes scraping tasks that much easier.
pup - Parsing HTML at the command line. written in go.
xidel - HTML/XML data extraction tool which is written in Pascal; also by the same author - texstudio

Interesting `~/bin`s on github

Some more linked on this page: 15 Greatest Open Source Terminal Applications Of 2012

Interesting

ronn - the opposite of roff.

Lorem ipsum

Jeffsum | A little text placeholder generator of Jeff Goldblum awesome… obviously.

OCR

Screenotate Take screenshots you can search.

Use Figlet and Toilet to generate ascii text banners in linux terminal.