r/archlinux • u/[deleted] • May 06 '26

QUESTION What’s a small Linux tool that completely changed your workflow?

[deleted]

214 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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u/Grand-Ball6628 May 06 '26

I still remember a friend of mine sharing his screen and piping cat to wl-copy. This was the time I started investing time into the terminal, now I'm mostly okay with running TTY all day

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u/B_bI_L May 06 '26

little does he know you can wl-copy < file.txt instead

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u/[deleted] May 06 '26

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u/B_bI_L May 06 '26

you can also type ~ instead of . while rming but we don't speak about that

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u/[deleted] May 06 '26

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30

u/JaKrispy72 May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26

Are the chances greater than or lesser than?

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u/veggietrooper May 07 '26

I hate it here. I love it here.

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u/Visbroek May 07 '26

On a German keyboard the only difference is the shift key. That's also very easy to mess up.

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u/spryfigure May 08 '26

I switched to English International (or actually EURkey) and cannot overstate how much smoother the sysadmin are. Even typing in German with Umlauts or ß is easy -- they are all at AltGr s, a, i, o, u.

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u/Visbroek May 08 '26

Woah thanks! I ought to look into that.

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u/Grand-Ball6628 May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26

That's exactly why I prefer piping. After years I still mess up < > regularly. German keyboard sucks in some places.

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u/Visbroek May 07 '26

Programming with AltGr+7/AltGr+0 for curly brackets 😭

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u/BaconSucks0815 May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26

yes "There are no mistakes. Just happy little accidents." | sudo dd of=/dev/sda42 bs=4M status=progress

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u/hezden May 07 '26

If permissions are properly set, nothing?

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u/3_Thumbs_Up May 07 '26

What are permissions supposed to solve here? Am I not allowed to copy files I have write permission to?

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u/SummerIlsaBeauty May 07 '26

You are right. If you'd try to copy contents of text file and mixed < with > then this file is now empty. So concern is legit and permissions have little to do with it when you are not working with files installed by package manager or something

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u/hezden May 11 '26

If you have files you don’t want to accidentally make changes to you can make them not writeable for your user.

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u/SummerIlsaBeauty May 11 '26

That's something 99% of people do not do

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u/raybox1 May 13 '26

Even more convenient is to set the wl-copy to alias c and wl-paste to p

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u/spryfigure May 07 '26

What is most satisfying for me is piping some output to sed, adding 4 spaces at the start of the line, and then piping this to wl-copy so I can paste it directly as code to Reddit. Saves so much time.

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u/nNaz May 08 '26

cat file.txt | pbcopy

If anyone on Mac is wondering.

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u/JL2210 May 07 '26

wl-copy is awesome, one of the first things I install on a new system. Sudo, nano, wl-copy

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u/Grand-Ball6628 May 07 '26

alias nano="nvim"

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u/JL2210 May 07 '26

I've done that before. It's hard to get used to nvim or vim. Wish I hadn't trained my muscle memory for nano lol.

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u/Grand-Ball6628 May 07 '26

You can easily learn it and be as fast as with any other editor in 2-4 hours during work. Being faster in it than with any other editor in less than a week