50
votes
Is there a command-line tool for converting html files to pdf?
pandoc is a great command-line tool for file format conversion.
The disadvantage is for PDF output, you’ll need LaTeX.
The usage is
pandoc test.html -t latex -o test.pdf
If you don't have LaTeX ...
39
votes
What is the fastest way to view images from the terminal?
No dependencies, one C file, one header file: imcat
Works on linux, macos, windows.
Automatically scales to terminal width, with quality down-sampling.
- 999
33
votes
Is there any decent speech recognition software for Linux?
OpenAI Whisper (fully offline and MIT licensed)
This option was previously mentioned at: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/718354/32558 In this answer I just want to provide slightly more direct usage ...
33
votes
Is there a command-line tool for converting html files to pdf?
You can also try wkhtmltopdf, usage and installation is pretty straightforward.
- 439
28
votes
Is there any decent speech recognition software for Linux?
Try nerd-dictation, it's a simple way to access VOSK-API, which is a high quality offline, open-source speech to text engine which works with both X11 and Wayland.
See demo video.
full disclosure, I ...
- 1,481
27
votes
How do I get a 30 minute break while working or doing anything on computers?
I use Workrave for this; it’s available in Debian as the workrave package.
I also noticed Safe Eyes, available as the safeeyes package, but haven’t tried it.
- 481k
26
votes
Is there a command-line tool for converting html files to pdf?
weasyprint is an option. A possible drawback is that you'll need python on your machine.
Install:
pip install weasyprint
Convert:
weasyprint in.html out.pdf
- 386
25
votes
Is there a robust command line tool for processing CSV files?
Miller is another nice tool for manipulating name-based data, including CSV (with headers). To extract the first column of a CSV file, without caring about its name, you’d do something like
printf '&...
- 481k
21
votes
Which free compiler implements C++14 new features?
According to the standards support pages for clang and gcc, you can use gcc >= 5.0 or clang >= 3.4. Most C++14 support was added in 4.9 for gcc, but a few features did not make it in until 5.0.
- 43.6k
20
votes
Where is metadata for PDF files? Can I insert metadata into any PDF file?
Ghostscript can insert or modify document metadata into any PDF.
Caveats: While doing so, Ghostscript will (1) first read in the complete PDF code, (2) second re-process that complete PDF code, (3) ...
- 1,571
18
votes
Terminal-based spreadsheets and wordprocessor?
I would suggest visidata.
VisiData is an interactive multitool for tabular data. It combines the clarity of a spreadsheet, the efficiency of the terminal, and the power of Python, into a ...
- 281
17
votes
Is there a robust command line tool for processing CSV files?
I'd recommend xsv, a "fast CSV command line toolkit written in Rust".
Written by Ripgrep's author.
Featured in How we made our CSV processing 142x faster (Reddit thread).
- 271
16
votes
What is the fastest way to view images from the terminal?
The kitty terminal can display inside the terminal with the icat "kitten"
E.g.
kitty +kitten icat /path/to/image
Example:
The kitty documentation suggests creating an alias, e.g.
alias icat="kitty ...
- 9,186
15
votes
Linux backup utility for incremental backups
I tried rsync, but it doesn't seem to be able to do what I want, or more likely, I don't know how to make it do that.
I know I could probably create a script that runs a diff and then selects the ...
- 5,019
14
votes
GUI for GIT similar to SourceTree
I tried all git clients for Linux, and they all suck someway or the other. But because my IDE is Visual Studio Code, I ended up using VSCode. I installed the following extensions:
Git Lens
Git Graph
...
- 241
14
votes
How do I get a 30 minute break while working or doing anything on computers?
You can use Stretchly as a breaktime reminder:
A microbreak for 20 seconds every 10 minutes.
Every 30 minutes, it displays a window containing an idea for a longer 5 minute break.
The description is ...
- 69.9k
13
votes
Any good csv bash utility?
Yes: CSVkit. http://csvkit.readthedocs.io/
CSV is not a standard that has anything to do with Unix, hence there are no "standard" (as in POSIX) utility for working with CSV files.
To vertically ...
- 356k
13
votes
Where is metadata for PDF files? Can I insert metadata into any PDF file?
pdftk is a command line utility allowing you to extract and modify the PDFs metadata using the dump_data and the update_info options.
The following command will extract the metadata of the input.pdf ...
- 69.9k
12
votes
Is there a robust command line tool for processing CSV files?
If you want a visual / interactive tool in the terminal, I wholeheartedly recommend VisiData.
It has frequency tables (shown above), pivot, melting, scatterplots, filtering / computation using Python, ...
- 131
12
votes
Is there a condensed side-by-side diff format?
diff -y --suppress-common-lines "$file1" "$file2"
would be the first thing to try. It is simple, and diff is a common Unix tool.
-y
makes it display side by side and
--suppress-...
- 229
12
votes
Accepted
Tool for searching across branches and through history in a Git repository
Heh, guess what I’ve been doing too...
To look for a file name across all branches, I use
git log --all --name-only --pretty=format:%H -- wow\*
wow can be replaced by any glob. This runs quite ...
- 481k
11
votes
Is there any (good) SQLite GUI for Linux?
A friend and I made Beekeeper Studio because we wanted a modern, easy to use SQL gui client. I'm a full time Linux desktop user, so we care about Linux.
It's 100% open source! Hope someone finds it as ...
- 281
11
votes
Sunrise and other astronomical data from the command line
For lazy bones as I am there is a very simple program called hdate, available in many distributions (apt-get install hdate on Debian/Ubuntu/…):
hdate -s -l N50 -L E14 -z2
Output:
Wednesday, 26 June ...
- 393
10
votes
Is there a robust command line tool for processing CSV files?
One of the best tool is Miller. It is like awk, sed, cut, join, and sort for name-indexed data such as CSV, TSV, and tabular JSON.
In example
echo '"this, is the first entry", this is the ...
- 3,005
10
votes
Is there something like a lorem ipsum generator?
While not technically Lorem Ipsum or a local binary, there is an API on Metaphorpsum which can output similar text but in English. I call it with curl like so:
curl http://metaphorpsum.com/sentences/...
- 101
10
votes
Tool for manipulating YAML files?
Mike Farah’s yq is my go-to tool for YAML manipulation. For example, using a Kubernetes namespace definition file:
extract the namespace name:
yq read deploy/namespace.yaml metadata.name
add a ...
- 481k
10
votes
Linux backup utility for incremental backups
Although tar does have an incremental mode there are a couple of more comprehensive tools to do the job:
Duplicity
Duplicati
They not only support incremental backups, it's easy to configure a ...
- 101
9
votes
Command line friendly spreadsheets
I use and recommend visidata.
It plays well with the shell – e.g. you can stick it at the end of your pipe. If
bzcat foo.bz2|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr | awk -f munge.awk |blah
produces a tsv, then
bzcat ...
- 424
9
votes
Terminal-based spreadsheets and wordprocessor?
For command-line interface (CLI) spreadsheet programs, see the following options:
1) SC: Spreadsheet Calculator (Linux Journal Article) / Ubuntu Manpage
2) SC-IM: Spreadsheet Calculator IMprovised (...
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible