If you are a software developer, sooner or later you’ll have to connect to a Linux machine to perform administrative tasks, access remote database servers, or deploy applications, among other things. Getting comfortable using the command-line interface (CLI) is a must if you want to be proficient with Linux. If you are looking into gaining confidence with Linux, here are 9 text-based user interface interactive tools that I found useful and that will help you get comfortable with the Linux CLI. You can explore these tools using your own Linux machine if you have one, or you can use or a virtual machine to install Linux and play around with it. Even better, you can repurpose an old laptop and use it, for example, as a database server, Git, or CI environment running on Linux if you want. Docker I haven’t included instructions on how to install each tool since different distributions require different steps. Most likely, your package manager will be able to install these tools if they are not provided by default with your Linux distribution. A quick online search should lead you to the right command to install each tool. htop is a process viewer similar to but it allows you to scroll both vertically and horizontally, and even interact with a mouse pointer. You can use the to perform tasks such as search, filter, or kill a process. htop top F-keys nmon is a system monitor, tuner, and benchmark tool. You can customize the displayed information using keyboard shortcuts to add sections for CPU, memory, network, disks, file systems, processes, and resources. nmon nmtui is a text-based interface for configuring networking (on top of ). If you don’t want to fiddle with config files, this tool is a great alternative (assuming your operating system uses NetworkManager). nmtui NetworkManager If you get funny colors when running the tool try defining the following environment variable: Tip: NEWT_COLORS='root=white,blue' nmtui iftop is a tool for displaying network traffic and bandwidth usage. Most likely, you’ll have to run it with and specify a network interface. For example: iftop sudo sudo iftop -i wlp3s0 iptraf is similar to (see the previous section) but offers a more interactive interface. It monitors IP LAN network traffic and displays TCP information, UDP counts, ICMP and OSPF information, Ethernet load information, node stats, IP checksum errors, and others. You need to run this tool as ( ). iptraf iftop root sudo mc or GNU Midnight Commander (to which I personally refer sometimes as the just for fun) is a popular visual shell for Linux. More specifically, it allows you to navigate and browse the files in your system. I found it useful when I’m configuring a system and need to go back and forth between different config files. It has mouse support and many keyboard shortcuts (run for more information). mc mighty commander man mc mcedit is the internal text editor of (see the previous section). However, you can also use this tool outside and take advantage of its many features, especially the mouse support in a fully-featured windowed editor, keyboard shortcuts, code navigation, syntax highlighting, and macro recording capabilities. mcedit mc mc nano is another popular small text editor suitable for quickly editing files. It has cool features such as opening multiple files, scrolling per line, undo/redo actions, syntax coloring, line numbering, and soft-wrapping lines. If you are looking for a more advanced and configurable text editor, you definitely have to check . nano vim mprocs allows you to run multiple processes in a single text-based interface. I usually run it like this: mprocs mcprocs sh sh sh sh with as many as I think I might need. It is a great tool when you are configuring stuff and need to tweak config files and run commands at the same time. sh Summary I certainly love these tools and they have served me well when performing DevOps tasks. I hope that at least one of these text-based CLI tools was new to you and that you’ll find it useful. Please, let me know in the comments if I missed a text-based CLI tool that you find useful when developing software or managing Linux systems. I’ll be happy to try it out! Originally published . here

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9 Useful Interactive CLI Tools for Linux

9 Useful Interactive CLI Tools for Linux

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Alejandro Duarte

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9 Useful Interactive CLI Tools for Linux

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Alejandro Duarte

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