What CLI apps you use to do common tasks like editing (pdf, audio, video, image) files.

antihero@social.fossware.space to Linux@lemmy.ml – 97 points –

Here is my list:

  • pdf - pdftk
  • images - imagemagickutilities
  • audio/video - ffmpeg
  • documents - libreoffice --headless mode, also pandoc
  • download files - wget and curl, also ytdlp for youtube, reddit
  • cloud storage - rclone
38

Rsync for moving files and backing up.

The ultimate it-just-works CLI tool.

Although I have never understood why it's called rsync, because you need to add --recursive to make it actually sync a file tree, which is what it does best.

  • Resizing images: mogrify (part of the imagemagick suite)
  • ffmpeg
  • pdftk is king for rotating/cropping/appending pdfs
  • LaTeX everything
  • make/shell - to script/automate image and document editing
  • pandoc is reasonably good for many things
  • latex2rtf - to get plain text for word counts out of LaTeX source
  • wc - word count, line count
  • ispell -t - does spell check in the terminal. The -t is so that it'll mostly ignore LaTeX commands in the source

I'm sure there's more but I don't memorize them, they kind of get remembered when I need them.

Your list looks like what I'd write anyway, so just commenting; ^ That.

find -exec is essential to process multiple files

7z handles wildcards inside a find -exec so you can save 200 lines of sh compliance

mpv plays online media since it uses yt-dlp

  • xournal for fake form-filling on PDFs - ugly and unintuitive but gets the job done
  • img2pdf - does what it says on the tin
  • ranger for managing files and launching stuff - not the coolest kid on the block but this is the single most impressive terminal app I have used in recent years, the key bindings and commands and defaults are so crazily intuitive that I hardly ever even need to consult the manual

Aria2c is the best downloader for large files. It also supports torrents.

I use:

  • qpdf for mucking around with pdfs, reordering, selecting pages, combining them, etc.
  • ffmpeg for video and audio sicing and transcoding. Usually encompassing a command in a script because I forget the precise params every time ;p
  • nvim for anything like Markdown (which can be converted to other things like LaTeX or pdf or html, sometimes in multiple stages)
  • imagemagick for simple image conversion stuff.
  • wget for downloads ^.^
  • youtube-dl or yt-dlp for grabbing youtube stuff.

Very similar to you. I do use gramma for spellchecking. My most used app overall is probably pandoc. I use it to make all my docs and presentations for work.

Do you create slides with it? Which input format do you use for that? I usually use LaTeX for slides but would be interested in an alternative.

You can also use ghostscript (gs) or the image magick convert with PDF.

I use rsync quite often and ssh as well.

I'd add:

  • ghostscript - with some basic perl scripts, works great for pdf flattening/compressing, merging, splitting, adding bookmarks etc.
  • poppler - pdfseparate, sometimes pdfunite
  • zathura - pdf viewing
  • feh - images
  • sshfs - prefer it to rclone
  • cheat
  • emacs - org-mode, latex, dired/wdired, capture, eshell, vterm, tramp
  • mc/midnight commander

I use most of these that you listed, except that I don't use office apps at all, and do all my documents using LaTeX in neovim.

Also, I have small helper scrips for pdf manipulation for tasks that I do regularly, like making my handwritten notes ready for printing at my office since I don't like the algo my office printer uses to convert them to B&W. I also use sejda-console for merging PDFs as it has nice options for manipulating TOC during the merge.

Another nice utility is ffpb which is basically a wrapper around ffmpeg that gives it a nice progress bar.

For me, it's pretty much just app management via my package manager, some file management, and the big ones are using neovim as a text editor and cmus as my primary music player (I also use emms in emacs sometimes)

For audio files sox and beets are my live saver.

  • pdfcrop (commonly included with LaTeX) for cropping margins - it cuts the pdf down to its contents then adds a margin of your choosing, extremely useful for forcing academic papers to have consistent margins, pdfcrop --margins 72 *pdf here* will create a document with a ~1in margin all around (it uses bp as its units)
  • vips for resizing/converting images - it's a bit faster and lighter than imagemagick in my experience, although the main reason I use it instead of imagemagick is just because I like playing around with stuff I haven't used before :) It has an officially supported python binding too

@antihero I use ffmpeg to extract frames from images. Yt-dlp to download youtube videos. Rmlint, to remove duplicates. Gallery-dl to sometimes download from sites like instagram or twitter & finally mpd / ncmpcpp to listen to music....

Does anyone know of an application which can eliminate excessive glare in a picture?

  • convert - convert between image formats as well as resize an image, blur, crop, despeckle, dither, draw on, flip, join, re-sample, etc. Almost nothing it can't do.