ddgr

This may seem rather esoteric, but because I've covered similar commands that deal with rival search engines, it seems more than fair to do the same for Duck Duck Go, a search engine that respects your privacy. It won't share your details, and it doesn't store anything in relation to your searches, unless you ask it to save your color and search preferences in a local cookie. If you've not used Duck Duck Go, or you haven't used it in a while, it's really improved over the last 12 months and now delivers results that are mostly comparable to Google. And when it's worse than Google, simply adding a !g to your search delivers results directly from Google through Duck Duck Go. This applies to other search engines and web portals too, such as Wikipedia or even eBay, making the web interface to Duck Duck Go a powerful portal to the open web.

All of which leads to ddgr, a command-line interface to Duck Duck Go searches. After installation, you just type ddgr followed by your search phrase, and the results will be delivered as numbered output. Select a number and the result is opened in your default web browser. There's even bang support for external searches, such as !g for Google, and you can limit the number of results, fire off new searches from the prompt, and specify MIME file types for searches. If you need to search while in something like Vim, it's the perfect solution, and one that could easily be worked into your own scripts and sites, for instance, if you want to add dynamic linking or cache bookmarks.

Project Website

https://github.com/jarun/ddgr

Search Duck Duck Go, and every other search engine supported by Duck Duck Go, directly from the command line.

Text editor

Suplemon

The Sublime Text editor has rightly become incredibly popular. Its minimal and beautiful user interface can adapt to any writing and programming style, and its exceptional plugin system can transform the editor into a fully fledged IDE, whether you're coding for Arduino or the cloud. One of its most innovative features is the ability to make multiple selections, rather than a single selection block used by nearly every other editor, which makes it easy to perform search and replace operations in a single pass or quickly change multiple instances of a variable name or the tags in a web document. This feature has been transposed into Suplemon, a console-based text editor that puts this "multicursor" text editing at the top of its features list, alongside TextMate theme support, autocomplete, and a tabbed view with multiple files open at once.

To illustrate how these features work, load up a new file and create more than one cursor using the mouse. When you now start typing, the same text will appear at each cursor position. This is particularly useful when you're starting a new file because you can quickly populate it with similar arguments for methods, as well as the structure used by each of the methods you're going to write, before switching back to single-cursor mode. As with the Nano text editor, the command-line interface isn't intimidating because most of the important keyboard shortcuts are shown at the bottom of the text file, making it easy to get started, easy to know how to save, and easy to open up extra help. It's also a more powerful choice than Nano, which makes this an ideal editor upgrade if you find yourself spending more and more time in the terminal.

Project Website

https://github.com/richrd/suplemon

If you want to try some of Sublime Text's best features without paying for the editor, check out Suplemon.