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Ask HN: What CLI tools do you wish existed?

11 points by bracewel ↗ HN
Who cares about mobile apps, what command line tools (platform in/dependent) do you wish existed?

The question comes from boredom and wanting to write something in Rust...

5 comments

[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 28.7 ms ] thread
bwilliams
I'm really interested in writing a command line client for Slack since the IRC gateway is heavily hit or miss. Once there's a decent websockets crate I'll jump on the idea.
jetblackio
I haven't thoroughly investigated possible CLI solutions for the following, but here are some things that come to mind.

* iMessages / SMS

* Viber / Slack / Whatsapp / Facebook (messages)

* Better calendar app

* Better Pivotal Tracker CLI

As you can see, I think messaging is a perfect use-case for the CLI, and you don't lose much functionality when compared to a GUI (except images, gifs and movies for the most part). So seeing development in that area would be awesome.

zaptheimpaler
This might already exist, but while tailing logs today I wished for a tool that would let me view a log file as its changing - like "tail -f" so new lines appear at the bottom, but with the added ability to scroll up, jump to any line, search etc like a text editor.
bracewel
Hm, this is a interesting idea, I'm not sure I know of a tool for doing this (beyond using tail -f .. | grep .. as a primitive search)
skuhn
less can do this:

  less +F /var/log/blah.log
then ctrl-c to switch into regular less mode (for scrolling back or searching), and 'F' to go back into follow mode to watch changes roll in.

You don't have to start less in follow mode either, 'F' will work regardless.