CLI Tools
Fuzzy Find Navigation
Navigating the file system in the command line is much faster with fuzzy finder than doing ls and cd operations. The fzf tool on the CLI by itself is really just a unix filter - it reads data from stdin, performs a transformation or operation on that data, and writes the result to stdout, so that it can be chained with other tools using pipes. To see this, simply run fzf and select a file. The outcome is that the selected file's filepath gets printed to stdout, it doesn't open the file for you like you would think! It's only useful once you chain its output to another tool.
For example, you can use it with find to find a file or directory:
# fuzzy search through files in cwd
find . -type f | fzf
# fuzzy search through folders in cwd
find . -type d | fzf
# fuzzy search with exact match
find . -type f | fzf -e
You can select multiple items in the fzf UI in multi select mode -m with shift + tab key on the file or directory.
To open the fzf selected file for vim, use:
vim `fzf` # open one file selected with fzf
vim -o `fzf -m` # open a list of files selected with fzf multi select in horizontal split windows
A lot of nice key bindings and features are available with the fzf shell integration. A cool feature is the ** sequence to trigger fuzzy finding:
# opens fuzzy finder to let you find exact file if you do not remember the name!
vim ~/.dotfiles/** # hit TAB after the ** to enter fuzzy completion
vim ../** # hit TAB after to select files under parent directory
vim ../fzf** # hit TAB after to find files under parent that match `fzf`
cd ~/** # hit TAB after this!
ssh ** # hit TAB shows possible hostnames fuzzy completed
The key bindings provided by the fzf shell integration are also very powerful. Instead of using ** in the bash command to invoke fzf, a faster way is to just use <Ctrl-T> at the place where you want the file paths to be pasted in, so cd <Ctrl-T> which will invoke fzf. Once you select the files, they will be pasted into the bash command at the place where you invoked fzf. For exclusively jumping directories, you can just use <Alt-C> to invoke fzf and cd directly into the selected directory! The only caveat is that they only start search relative to current working directory, so any directories and files above are not accessible through these shortcuts, you either need to use ../** or ~/** or have some other shortcut set up.
Using the shell integration is so much faster than manually typing in the fzf commands. Most of the time, you just want to find a file path and put that somewhere or cd into a directory, which is where <Ctrl-T> and <Alt-C> shines.
FFmpeg
A really powerful CLI tool available in bash is ffmpeg which is extremely versatile and powerful for working with media files. It can record, process, stream, and process audio and video - as a result it is used under the hood by OBS, VLC, Youtube, Zoom, Audacity etc. and is a good tool for scripting.
# convert video to mp4
ffmpeg -i input.mov output.mp4
# extract audio from video
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -q:a 0 -map a output.mp3
# resize video
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "scale=1280:720" output_720p.mp4
# make a gif from part of a video
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -t 5 -ss 00:00:03 -vf "scale=500:-1" output.gif
ffmpeg is more like a bare metal video editor and media toolkit accessible directly through CLI.
Resources
fzfintro video here