This is part three of the Power Up Your Command Line series. In this article, I’ll showcase five utilities that will make common problems a little easier to solve using the command line.

tig, for interactively browsing your git repo

tig (GitHub) is an excellent way to browse your Git repository using an interactive interface, without leaving the command line.

tig is simple and intuitive to use, and has different views for things like your stash, staging area (which it lets you quickly alter), logs, and so on.

Thanks for Renato Suero (@renatosuero) for introducing me to tig on DEV.

Installing tig

PathPicker (fpp), for quickly selecting files

PathPicker (GitHub) is a library by Facebook for quickly selecting files on the command line. The animated example below is taken from the PathPicker documentation.

From the PathPicker website:

PathPicker accepts a wide range of input — output from git commands, grep results, searches — pretty much anything. After parsing the input, PathPicker presents you with a nice UI to select which files you’re interested in. After that, you can open them in your favorite editor or execute arbitrary commands.

Thanks to Nikolay Dubina (@nikolayid) for suggesting this utility.

Installing PathPicker

tldr, for practical examples for how to use CLI tools

tldr (GitHub) lets you quickly access practical examples (simplified, “tl;dr” versions of man pages) of how to use command line tools.

The examples are maintained by the community in the tldr GitHub repository.

Installing tldr