💾 Archived View for gemini.ctrl-c.club › ~55robots › feb21CLI.gmi captured on 2022-04-28 at 17:54:32. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Here are three commands that I like quite a bit. When my memory fails me or if I use a machine that is low tech. So let's fire up the terminal and go!

apropos

Sooooo french. apropos helps you outpout a list of installed programs by searching the argument of the command in all program names and manual pages. For example, when I do not remember what video editor and or player are installed, I just type

apropos video

and the output will be

amdgpu (4) - AMD RADEON GPU video driver

ati (4) - ATI video driver

dvdunauthor (1) - Decodes DVD-Video file structure

dvgrab (1) - Capture DV or MPEG-2 Transport Stream (HDV) video and audio data from FireWire

fbdev (4) - video driver for framebuffer device

ffmpeg (1) - ffmpeg video converter

ffmpeg-all (1) - ffmpeg video converter

ffmpeg-scaler (1) - FFmpeg video scaling and pixel format converter

io.elementary.photos-video-thumbnailer (1) - writes video thumbnail to stdout

kdenlive (1) - An open source non-linear video editor.

melt (1) - author, play, and encode multitrack audio/video compositions

modesetting (4) - video driver for framebuffer device

mpeg2desc (1) - multiplex audio/video streams

nouveau (4) - NVIDIA video driver

olive-editor (1) - video editor

[...]

So now olive and kdenlive ring a bell. What is melt? never heard of it. Cool, let's try melt then. Sometimes the list is a bit long, but reading the manual page helps you broaden or narrow the search by using wildcards or performing exact search.

surf

I just really like this very light web-browser. I can fire it anytime while in the CLI. Not an only text, but a full web browser stripped to the bare minimum. If you do not have it yet, type:

sudo apt install surf

(that's for a debian base environment).

And then start it by typing surf followed by the URL you want:

surf duckduckgo.com

There you are, a small minimalistic web browsing window to explore the web. Very good when I need a graphical interface to surf the web on a very low spec machine, on which even Falkon or Dillo would take too long to open.

figlet

Well, this one is quite handy now that we all want to play around from the terminal to output some nice titles for our Gemini capsules.

One 'sudo apt install figlet' later and you are ready to figlet anytext into some ascii retro titles.

For example:

figlet Orbit

will output this:

 / _ \ _ __| |__ (_) |_ 
| | | | '__| '_ \| | __|
| |_| | |  | |_) | | |_ 
 \___/|_|  |_.__/|_|\__|

Not kidding, but after this you can also install and try the toilet command.

Home