Oh boy. This is a rabbit hole which, once you fall into, there’s no coming back out.

There is a world of terminal software. You can, quite reasonably, get entirely rid of X (and Wayland) and live in the console. Honestly, the reason I don’t is only because there is no fully competent terminal web browser (although there are some quite good ones), and because anything having to do with graphics like photo management, or vector graphics drawing, is really where GUIs are useful. But for everything else, terminal clients are almost always superior.

Choosing a good terminal emulator is important, and the best one right now is Rio. It’s fast, smaller memory footprint, and less CPU use than Wezterm or Kitty, and it supports ligatures, iTerm, and SIXEL graphics.

In that goes tmux, because it works over ssh and having consistent everywhere is handy, because it survives terminal and window manager crashes, and because you can open multiple clients in different windows on the same tmux session.

In that runs zsh, because it’s the best shell. It’s backwards-compatible to bash, but has a ton of extra features.

I’m conservative about replacing standard POSIX tools with new fad tools, because grep is literally everywhere (even BusyBox) and new things usually aren’t; but ripgrep and fd are such nice improvements over grep and find I’ve been unable to resist. Helix is currently the best text editor. However, having a good familiarity with grep, find, and vi is IMHO critical, because they’re the foundations.

My media player is ostui, which is an ncurses SubSonic client with synced lyrics and cover art support. I use catnip for visualization, because it uses less memory and CPU than cava. For task management I use a bespoke script (tdp) that use fzf with todo.txt files. I use gotop for system monitoring.

I try to use chawan for terminal web browsing, and it does do CSS layout better than most, and supports sixel image rendering, but it’s often a chore so I mostly browse in Luakit, which is a GUI program.

rook is my secret service tool that uses a KeePassXC DB as the backing store, and provides credentials to everything that needs them.

• vdirsyncer syncs my calendar and contracts to a VPS, and thence to my phone
• mbsync syncs all of my email from my IMAP server, and I use notmuch to index and tag it
• khard is a terminal address book that uses standard vcard directories
• lbb is a super-fast address book search tool which also works on vcard directories
• khal is a TUI calendar app, which works with vcal directories
• aerc, which someone else mentioned, is a fantastic TUI email client that can use notmuch.
• tasker is what I use for scheduled cron control; it uses standard crontab files.
• devmon and udevil handle automounts of USB media
• mosh is a UDP-based ssh, with interruptable sessions and network resilience
• mpdris2-rs is the agent I use to hook up various media control tooling to ostui (which supports the mpris protocol) and other players - mpris is a sort of standardized glue for media players.
• gomuks is an excellent TUI for Matrix
• weechat is a TUI for IRC. I prefer gomuk’s interface, but you can get a Matrix plugin for weechat if you want to use only one. I find I often have to restart weechat because otherwise it end up eating all of the memory; there’s a memory leak, or something in it.
• syncthing-daemon for syncing between almost everything
• restic for backups

dinit handles all of my user task management, because systemd is fucking broken for user tasks. dinit is a better init system.

Almost every application I use is a cli or TUI client. The exceptions are the web browser, for reasons I’ve explained; Jami, which doesn’t have a CLI client; Factorio, which is a game; and darktable for photo management. I’ll also occasionally open Gimp or Inkscape for graphics, vlc for movies (which I could probably watch in the terminal, now that I think of it), and I usually view PDFs in a GUI client such as mupdf.

My philosophy on software is to use standards wherever possible. I avoid programs that insist on using their own DBs when there’s a perfectly good standard, such as ics, maildir, and so on. It’s just another form of vender lock-in. Hence notmuch (maildir), khard and lbb (directory of .ics), khal (directory of .vcs), rook (KeePass DB), and so on. This drives most of my tooling choices.

1. lazydocker: terminal based docker management
2. ncdu: disk usage analyzer
3. nmtui: terminal based network management
4. browsh: terminal based web browser with headless Firefox backend

I rely on cli tools for a lot of things too. Here’s a list:

tmux: terminal multiplexer
zsh (with fzf zsh completion): shell
fzf: fuzzy finder
doas: sudo replacement
bat: cat replacement
fd: find replacement
advcpmv: cp/mv replacement
eza: ls replacement
zenith: htop replacement
trash-cli: trash management
neomutt: email client (notmuch is a most recommended addition)
neovim (and plugins): text/code editor
buku: internet bookmarks manager
tut: mastodon client
ucollage: image viewer
udevil: (un)mounting removable devices and networks without a password
magic-tape: youtube search/download and more
rofi: used with scripts to do a lot of things
pass: password manager
yazi: file explorer
iwd: wireless manager
khal: calendar and webdav sync with vdirsyncer
taskjuggler: complete task manager
newsboat: feed aggregator
fwupd: firmware updater
chawan: web browser
ncmpcpp: mpd-client
duf: disk usage
abook: contacts manager

I have some of them detailed here.
This GitHub also has a long list.

Edit: added abook and duf to the list

Unpopular opinion maybe: many of the suggestions here are not worth the time.

Buy I’ll add one to the mix: yt-dlp I use a lot to download YouTube videos. Very robust.

My list is a bit software developer-centric, but can be useful for development-adjacent tasks too.

• The Github CLI - great for doing routine GH work, like opening PRs or filing issues.
• glab - ditto for Gitlab.
• jq - JSON parsing, formatting, searching and modification.
• pup - like jq, but for HTML pages.
• sed - A powerful text find-and-replace tool with regular expressions.
• scp - File transfers over SSH.
• xargs - run a command for every line of output from another command. Great for automating manual tasks.
• curl - make any type of HTTP (and many other protocols) request from the command line.
• tar - compress/uncompress archive files.
• pwgen - generate passwords with lots of options.
• uuidgen - generate universally unique ids.
• exiftool - read and modify image/video/audio file metadata. Good for adding/editing tags/albums/dates/etc.

I’m a big fan of jq. It’s a domain-specific language for manipulating JSON data.

ImageMagick is like ffmpeg but for images.

inotify-tools has command-line utilities that can be used in a Bash script or a Bash one-liner to make arbitrary things “happen” when something “happens” to a file or directory. (Then the file is opened or written to or renamed or whatever.)

I probably should mention rsync. It’s like a swiss army knife for copying files from one place to another. And it supports “keeping files syncronized” between two locations.

Of course, there’s tons of stuff that you pretty much can’t talk about Bash scripting without mentioning. Sed, awk, grep, find, etc.

Also, I totally relate about the terminal giving more dopamine. I kinda just hate going on a point-and-click adventure to do things like image editing or whatever. To the point that I’ve written a whole-ass domain-specific-language to do what I want rather than use Gimp. (And I’m working on another whole-ass domain-specific-language to do a traditionally-GUI-app sort of task.)

Midnight Commander (mc) is a classic file manager if you grew up in the 90s with Norton Commander on DOS.

For my local Git repositories I prefer lazygit now. There’s also a plethora of other lazy* tools for e.g. Docker.

And you should maybe look at dialog or whiptail to spice up your shell scripts.

If you do Python, there’s the rich library and there’s also pythondialog. Both pretty easy to use. If you want more, there’s textual.

EDIT: mutt for emails is nice once you’ve managed to set it up.

things i use:

• gitui . terminal UI for git (like lazygit)

• helix . modal text editor similar to vim, but with less configuration required

• eza . basically ls but with some more features

Some I haven’t seen mentioned yet:

• bottom, a process manager written in rust.
• starship.rs, a smart prompt that works with most shells. Fish is my fav.
• broot. A unique file explorer and search.
• dua-cli a space analyzer.
• fdupes . Find and remove duplicate files.

Ripgrep (rg) instead of grep or ack. Stupid fast.

yt-dlp since I don’t see it mentioned.

Drop tmux and use zellij (if you are scared of tmux, zellij is easier to learn IMO).

GNU Parallel: It lets you run multiple things in parallel. It’s very useful for batch converting large numbers of files.

Git: lazygit
Docker management : lazydocker

Well, seeing them in the list like that rubs me the wrong way. 😅

Both of those come with a CLI, called git and docker respectively, which is the official way of using them. These CLIs might not be particularly sexy, depending on who you ask, but they’re decent enough and worth learning, even if you go the lazy* route, since online resources all just explain the official CLIs and you might find yourself one day administering remote systems where you can’t install additional software…

Let’s save yourself some time. https://github.com/toolleeo/awesome-cli-apps-in-a-csv

I often work with media files. These are some tools I really like in this domain:

• Exiftool Best metadata editor around. And it’s basically a single massive perl script…
• MediaInfo Metadata viewer specifically for AV Files. Comes with a GUI viewer but also works just from the command line.
• FFprobe part of the ffmpeg project. For getting information about streams in AV files
• ImageMagick For editing/convertig images.
• G’Mic Also for image processing. But more for creative stuff.
• GStreamer (gst-launch for running pipelines) AV Stream manipulation, Video Editing
• DNGLab For convertig RAW Images to DNG. Its the only one I found that works well with fujifilm RAF files (and its fast)
• SoX Swiss Army Knife of sound processing
• Gltfpack For reducing the size of gltf files (3d meshes)

I’ve been meaning to try out netpbm

If you aren’t aware, pbm represents an image with plaintext, which makes it great for when you want to easily create an image with code

I recently learned there is a whole suite of CLI tools which work with the format. Like conversion to/from png, scaling, and overlaying one image on top of another.