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.

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.

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).

emacs is great, from your list it can do at least email/file management/file editing/git/piracy/python/web browser

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.

• dua-cli - file storage analyzer, ncdu alternative
• topgrade - one tool to upgrade all package managers

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

zoxide. It’s cd but better. It remembers which directories you’ve navigated to, and fuzzy finds them.

So instead of typing:

cd /really/long/path/to/sime/dir

You can type:

zoxide dir

And it’ll take you right to the directory.

I’ve got it aliased to zd so I type:

zd dir

And I’m there.

nvtop : visualize nvidia GPU usage and memory

top : monitor/manage processes although ps aux | grep appName is still my goto.

pyenv : easily install and use any python version

ipython : a customizable python interpreter. I have figured out many poorly modules using ipython and great for exploring modules.

Import psutil as ps

ps.#then hit tab

after hitting tab will show all attributes related to your imported module, use arrow keys to select methods == profit!

nethogs : monitor network connections by app.

firejail : app sandboxing

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.

Xargs, bc, paste, sed, awk.

Well, I used vi a lot, but seriously nano is better especially for beginner.

I also use DoubleCommander instead of midnight one

du-dust - disk usage (written in R U S T ⚙️) bottom/btm - htop/top replacement zed editor obs-studio (not CLI exactly)

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)

The suggestions in the comments are all nice, but the biggest game changer for me was nushell. Once you understand how it works there is no going back. I have saved so many hours already.