This article recommends awesome (and even funny) terminal tools, both executables and libraries.
I first posted this on Oct 22th, 2015. And it is renewed on Mar 23rd, 2018.
Softwares
tldr
📚 Simplified and community-driven man pages.
$ tldr ps
ps
Information about running processes.
- List all running processes:
ps aux
- List all running processes including the full command string:
ps auxww
- Search for a process that matches a string:
ps aux | grep string
lock-cli
Lock your system from the command-line. Support macOS, Linux, and Windows.
$ lock
Then, your OS will be locked.
Gotty
An awesome live broadcasting tool, which output your terminal, written with Go.
Wego
Weather forecasting with ASCII GUI written in Go.
Qrcode-terminal
Generate and display QR code with Node.js.
Douban.fm
Console based Douban FM client, written in Node.js. It runs on Mac but not very stable.
ProxyChains
Socks and HTTP proxy for terminal. And we can use proxychains to boost speed of some services and get across the wall.
$ proxychains4 git push
coinmon
💰 Cryptocurrency price ticker CLI.
$ coinmon
Libraries
Terminal Table
Terminal Table is a fast and simple, yet feature rich ASCII table generator written in Ruby.
Simple but useful gem for Ruby. terminal-table is really powerful and easy-to-use to build and display tables in console based GUI.
This is the official example of terminal-table:
rows = []
rows << ['One', 1]
rows << ['Two', 2]
rows << ['Three', 3]
table = Terminal::Table.new :rows => rows
# > puts table
#
# +-------+---+
# | One | 1 |
# | Two | 2 |
# | Three | 3 |
# +-------+---+
macOS Specifics
MAS
Mac App Store command line interface.
It is designed for scripting and automation. However, I really like and need this awesome tool to update with terminal instead of the AppStore GUI, which fails frequently in China mainland.
$ mas list
724472954 Manico (2.3.2)
623795237 Ulysses (2.8.2)
411246225 Caffeine (1.1.1)
409203825 Numbers (4.1.1)
836500024 WeChat (2.2.8)
928871589 Noizio (1.5)
409201541 Pages (6.1.1)
784801555 Microsoft OneNote (15.34)
409183694 Keynote (7.1.1)
410628904 Wunderlist (3.4.6)
973134470 Be Focused (1.6.2)
$ mas upgrade
Upgrading 1 outdated application:
WeChat (2.2.8)
==> Downloading WeChat
==> Installed WeChat
m-cli
Swiss Army Knife for macOS! By m-cli, it enables you to control everything of Mac with commands.
$ m
 Swiss Army Knife for macOS ! 
usage: m [OPTIONS] COMMAND [help]
OPTIONS
--update update m-cli to the latest version
--uninstall uninstall m-cli
COMMANDS:
help
battery
bluetooth
dir
disk
display
dns
dock
finder
firewall
gatekeeper
group
hostname
info
itunes
lock
network
nosleep
notification
ntp
printer
restart
safeboot
screensaver
service
shutdown
sleep
timezone
trash
update
user
volume
vpn
wallpaper
wifi
$ m battery status
Now drawing from 'AC Power'
-InternalBattery-0 (id=3997795) 100%; charged; 0:00 remaining present: true