I’ve been using Linux as my daily driver for over five years. In that time, I’ve collected dozens of commands — but the ones below are the ones that actually stuck. These aren’t the flashy ones from “top 100 Linux commands” listicles. These are the quiet workhorses.
1. tldr — man pages for humans
Forget reading a 500-line man page just to remember the right flag for tar. tldr gives you the 5 most common usages, instantly.
$ tldr tar
# Extract a tar archive:
tar xf archive.tar.gz
# Create a tar archive:
tar czf output.tar.gz directory/2. fzf — fuzzy finder that changes everything
Pipe anything into fzf and get an interactive, fuzzy-searchable list. I use it for command history, file navigation, and branch switching in git.
# Search command history interactively
$ history | fzf
# Open any file quickly
$ find . -type f | fzf | xargs nvim3. rg (ripgrep) — search faster than grep
Ripgrep is grep, but written in Rust and orders of magnitude faster on large codebases. It also respects .gitignore by default.
$ rg "TODO" --type py“The best tool is the one you actually remember to use.”
4. watch — repeat a command automatically
Running df -h every 30 seconds to watch disk usage? Let watch do it for you.
$ watch -n 5 df -h5. htop / btop — actually readable process viewer
Plain top works, but btop is a visual upgrade that shows CPU, memory, and network in a clean TUI. Worth the install.
The remaining 5 commands are z (smart cd), bat (cat with syntax highlighting), fd (better find), exa (better ls), and ncdu (disk usage navigator). Each one earns its place.