Less Known Shell Utilities

1. tldr

tldr simplifies man pages with more practical examples.

man pages came built-in with Unix systems and were designed to help the user understand usage patterns for any given command. In practice, man pages don't tend to have a simple enough presentation and content.

tldr makes man pages practical, through its simplicity.

e.g compare the tldr page for tar with the man page.

Learn more on its project website.

2. bat

bat is an alternative to the cat command with advanced features such as:

• Syntax highlighting
• Git integration
• The ability to show non printable characters

The usage is identical to cat, so it's an easy switch. Learn more about bat on its GitHub repo.

3. z

z tracks your most used directories and helps you navigate to quicker.

Before z, you had to remember the path to your important projects. After z, you can simply type the project directory and jump straight to it.

You will get to where you want to be by typing considerably less than you'd need if you were using cd.

Check out all its features on the z GitHub repo.

4. glow

Glow is a markdown reader for your terminal.

It helps you enhance your experience with reading and navigating through markdown (as compared to less or other basic text editors that don't support markdown rendering natively).

Try it for yourself by following the instructions on its GitHub repo.

5. asciinema

asciinema is a CLI tool for recording terminal sessions.

Its recordings are saved into a lightweight asciicast format (.cast), instead of the traditional heavyweight video files (.mp4, .mov, etc).

Since .cast is text based, the recordings are fully searchable. Great for sharing code snippets, commands, and terminal outputs in a manner that can be easily copied and pasted.

Check out some sample recordings on their Explore page.