Some tools I find useful

Last updated May 27, 2019

Some of the software I consistently find useful:

Standalone apps

• The Paste App allows you to keep an accessible, searchable history of data you've copied to the clipboard. You can easily recopy and then paste anything you've previously copied. This is most frequently useful when you want to copy multiple, separate sections of text from a source and then paste them somewhere else. With Paste, you can copy them all to the clipboard history while on one document, and then paste them one at a time onto the other, without having to switch back and forth between the documents.

Command-Line

• howdoi searches Stack Overflow for you and looks for solutions to common programming tasks. For example:
  $ howdoi format date in bash
DATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`


• tldr provides "simplified and community-driven man pages". It's a quick way to see how a command is commonly used. For example:
  $ tldr tar
- Create an archive from files:
tar -cf target.tar file1 file2 file3

- Create a gzipped archive:
tar -czf target.tar.gz file1 file2 file3

- Extract an archive in a target directory:
tar -xf source.tar -C directory
...



• ngrok allows you to assign a temporary url to a localhost port. This is great for sharing or testing a draft of a website or service which is running locally on your machine.


• which -a shows where executables are located, for example:
  $ which -a python
/Users/Eric/Berkeley/seti/miniconda2/bin/python
/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/python
/usr/local/bin/python
/usr/bin/python



• To find the largest files in a folder, use: find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 du -sh | sort -hr | head. This can be quite useful for deleting cleaning up space. I use it on my trash and downloads directories.


• In ~/.bash_profile, my color settings are set with:
  export PS1="\[\033[36m\]\u \[\033[90m\]- \@ - \[\033[m\]\[\033[33;1m\]\w\[\033[m\]\$ "
export CLICOLOR=1
export LSCOLORS=ExFxBxDxCxegedabagacad
alias ls='ls -GFh'