That list of commands and applications I mentioned the other day has absorbed a lot of my free time, which is a good thing. There are quite a few there that deserve investigation, even if the opposite is probably true too, sometimes.

As I mentioned in the comments there, if you want to see the list I already have … well, I can tell you that the six or seven applications I had tucked away are already on the list.

Which means if you export the list I linked to, you’re getting the same information, nicely formatted and probably prettier than I could make it.

But I should mention a couple of other resources that I either found, or were sent to me, even if they’re not nearly as planet-crushing as that list is.

The first is for vim users, or vim newcomers, who might want a little help figuring out how to work the darn thing.

Not my invention; credits are in the image. I would have loved to have had that, about five years ago. Of course, something like it was probably out there, I just didn’t look for it. 🙄

It does make vim a little less obtuse, and at the same time show some of the leaner tricks vim can do. I certainly don’t count myself as a vim fan (just a casual acquaintance), so it was instructive to me too.

Along the same lines, someone sent me a link to this page about a month ago, as a quick-and-dirty list of nifty commands at your disposal.

Some of those are more complex than others, like the sed acrobatics. On the other hand, some require outside software to be installed, like rsync, which you sometimes have to add to a distribution.

And some of them I had just never really thought about before, such as checking an international time with TZ and date in a single line. Of course! 😀

And along the same lines as that is something I don’t think I’ve linked to before, even if I have referred to it about once a month or so for years … a couple of bash shell productivity narratives from Jeff Schroeder.

I’ll let that site speak for itself; like I said I find those pages very helpful at a frequency of about a dozen times a year, and not always for command line voodoo.

It’s a couple of clearly written, nicely illustrated explanations on how to get yourself moving in the shell. And for things that look easy — like simple math or taking advantage of your command history — there are lots of good ideas there.

There. Those three things should keep you busy for an hour or so. Enjoy. :