What are some programs/tools/packages that you can't live without? (piefed.social)

submitted 1 day ago by steel_for_humans@piefed.social to c/linux4noobs@programming.dev

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Disclaimer: I tried searching for something like "useful programs", "useful packages", "useful tools", "recommended packages", etc. Don't see any posts like that, if this is a duplicate, then it's not intentional and my search skills have failed me.

Anyway, I was watching a YT video today and the guy launched a cool program in his terminal, I paused to see what he was running. It was btop, of course being new I never heard about it. Then I thought -- how many cool tools/packages are there, which people use, but I am not aware of?

So what do you like? What do you install on a fresh install? What are the most useful tools in your belt? What can't you live without on Linux?

Perhaps I'll find something useful :)

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[-] tal@lemmy.today 2 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

But bash left a lot to be desired in that regard; its history simply didn’t record everything.

Bash doesn't merge history from multiple bash instances into your ~/.bash_history by default. If you want that to persist:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1288/preserve-bash-history-in-multiple-terminal-windows

Add the following to your ~/.bashrc:

# When the shell exits, append to the history file instead of overwriting it
shopt -s histappend

[-] OUwUO@programming.dev 2 points 7 hours ago

Thank you for that! IIRC, it was one of the settings I took from bash-sensible. I can say that it definitely improved after just a couple of changes to ~/.bashrc. Add in ble.sh and it suddenly seemed somewhat modern instead of archaic.

Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly what broke the camel's back. However, FWIW, contrary to how I recall my experiences with bash and zsh, I don't feel any frustration while using using fish. So it's definitely doing something for me 😉.

this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2026

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