Playing with (MacOS) terminal

While reading today’s article, I stumbled upon the I Feel Like a Hacker Using These Cool Linux Terminal Tools article, which gave me a few great tips that I want to put here for further reference.

The gping tool

The article in general describes a few fun tools that “make you feel like a hacker”. Joke aside, the article also referred to one tool that I did not know and that I will keep using for the foreseeable future. That’s the gping tool, which pings a set of IP addresses and displays these in a neat terminal graphic.

I am running this tool to see what’s the response time for 8.8.8.8. I’m using this as an indication of the quality of my current connection. So far, I was using a simple ping, but having this tool is much cooler (and also, it can ping multiple addresses, in case I need that).

I also saw the --cmd parameter of the tool. This command allows running a specified command at a specified interval instead of pinging an address, and it displays the command execution time in the graph instead.

The bpytop tool

bpytop is a Python-based implementation of htop. htop is a very cool tool on its own, but bpytop takes it to the next level. At first sight, it seems to have more “bells and whistles,” but in the end, I might actually revert to using htop. In any case, it’s a nice alternative to have.

Hosting both in the same terminal

I was used to run these two in a separate tabs of my Warp or iTerm terminals. However, I decided that it’ll be much more efficient to put these in a single terminal window.

Warp does not provide “muxing” capabilities (yet), so I decided to use tmux for the goal. I was having my eyes on this tool for quite a while; now was the time to start learning it. It turned out pretty easy, especially with the help of Redhat’s A beginner’s guide to tmux and, of course, the “Getting started” guide in the main tmux repo.

In the end, I had this in my terminal. It’s a bit “long” aside, but it’s doing a great job so far. The possibilities are limitless.

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