5 command-line apps I install on every new Linux PC

Published Jul 25, 2026, 3:00 PM EDT David has been lifelong fan of technology who loves putting his passion into words. A journalist by training, he discovered the power of Unix-like operating systems when learning how to edit video on macOS, back when it was still called Mac OS X, in the mid-2000s. A lover of retrocomputing, he appreciates the vast history of Unix that Linux continues today. David holds a BA in communication from California State University, East Bay. His writing has appeared in Techopedia, TMCnet, The Motley Fool blog network, and HTG's sister publication MUO, among others. Any serious Linux user will have their list of favorite command-line apps that they immediately install on any new machine. I am no exception. It seems I'm finding more apps that I want to install. Here are some more of my go-to terminal apps. Style and Diction Check the readability of my writing I'm a writer, and I rely on several tools to keep my own writing ship-shape. There are spell checkers, and Grammarly offers suggestions that I can take or leave, but sometimes I need to be able to analyze my writing beyond what simple spelling or grammar checkers offer. This is where the GNU Style and Diction come in. It's a package that combines two programs, Diction and Style. Diction will check a writing sample for common mistakes and highlight them using square brackets ([]), with possible suggestions. It's almost like having a local version of Grammarly in the terminal. Style will look at a sample and display characteristics such as the readability of a piece. One piece of information I pay particular attention to is the grade level or years of schooling that a person would have to read a document. I'll demonstrate this by running style on a sample of my own writing and an abstract from an article from an open-access academic journal on statistics. For the first sample, I'll use one of my recently published pieces on HTG. I'll run style from the command line: style I'll copy and paste the text from my piece into the terminal, as style by itself will read from standard input. The first section in the output will highlight the readability. The Kincaid score is 9.0, which means that it will take nine years of schooling to be able to understand the article, about the level of 9th grade in an American high school. Because academic pieces are written in an information-dense style, the abstract of the journal article requires roughly 18 years of schooling, which is more than most university undergrad programs. That's without going into all the math and statistics knowledge that you'd need to understand the piece. Weechat IRC still lives This one might be cheating, since I only have this installed on a remote shell account. Weechat is a terminal-based IRC client. While IRC is a lot less popular than it was at its peak in the '90s and the early 2000s, it's still an important source of info for people involved in Linux and the open source movement. Even non-software projects like Wikipedia coordinate much of their activity over IRC. Libera.chat is a popular hub for open activity. I also like to hang out on the #math and #statistics channels, even if they aren't about a specific open-source project, because I've developed an interest in statistical computing. What I like about using a terminal-based client is that I can leave it running in the background while I do other things, like surf the web or run regressions in a Jupyter notebook or in IPython. It's a distraction-free method of staying in touch where I can dip back into it when I feel like it or I get a notification sound when I get mentioned. I also use it in conjunction with tmux on the remote shell server that I'll mention later. Git Keeping track of my code Git is a version control system that was created by Linus Torvalds, who also invented the Linux kernel. I mainly use Git to manage my personal repositories on GitHub. I mainly use the latter as a portfolio for my coding projects, including my statistical programming projects in Jupyter. Like with Linux, it's possible to shoot yourself in the foot with Git if you aren't careful. Most of my commands deal with committing to my repository, then pushing the change to the remote GitHub server. When I want to commit a change to my repository, I'll use this command: git commit -m "Commit message." If I'd omitted the -m followed by the commit message, Git would have prompted me for a message. This is just a note to identify why I made the change to anyone who might read the logs later, especially me in a few months! tmux Multiple windows on my terminal tmux is another tool that I use mainly on remote machines, but I like to keep it handy on my local ones to use in a pinch. tmux is a terminal multiplexer developed by the OpenBSD project. A terminal multiplexer lets you split one terminal into multiple terminals. It's similar to tabbed terminals but more flexible. tmux lets you detach a session from one terminal and reattach it to another. This is handy over SSH. On the rare occasions when I use Linux virtual consoles, I can use tmux to split the screen without having to switch virtual consoles. Pixi Fast coding environment updates I used to use mamba to manage my scientific Python environment with NumPy, SciPy, pandas, and others, but I found that it was taking a ridiculously long time to update compared to other packages. Pixi uses the same repositories, but is much faster to update. It's written in Rust, which probably boosts its speed. I use a global environment for my stats libraries. To update it, I just need to run one command: pixi global update There will never be enough command-line tools on Linux Perhaps someday I'll write another article to cover even more essential command-line tools as I discover them. I will keep finding even more command-line favorites that will likely occupy future lists.