Since I last posted about some modern-ish CLI tools, I noticed that I omitted many tools I extensively use and new ones I discovered since.
byobu. This provides a consistent and user-friendly wrapper on top of either GNU Screen or tmux. With it, you can persist on a server some virtual terminals. It uses function keys to do most of its operations, and you can always use the original function keys by pressing "shift-F12". It comes with the useful byobu-ugraph that can simple histograms on the status bar using UTF-8 characters.
xh. This is yet another alternative to HTTPie, but rather than simply wrapping curl, it implements a full HTTP client on its own. It is packaged as a single statically compiled binary, so it is easy to install and faster than HTTPie. If you symbolic-link it as xhs, it will automatically default to HTTPS.
btop++. I was looking for a simple yet comprehensive monitoring tool I can use on the command-line to quickly look at CPU, process, memory, and disk usage. So far, this is my preferred one. While I still prefer htop as a direct replacement of the top command, btop is quite easy to use without additional configuration, and again as a single static binary.
jo. This is a simple tool to generate valid JSON objects out of command-line parameters.
jq. This is like grep or sed, but for JSON input. You can "query" any part of one or more JSON objects, and generate from that a result JSON fragment, or the plain text raw value. For example, the following uses the REST API of ipify.org to get your IP address:
xhs api.ipify.org format==json | jq -r .ip
Published on February 12, 2022 at 12:00 EST
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