5 MacOS command line tools I swear by over their GUI counterparts

When it comes to using MacOS, many people assume it's all about user-friendliness and graphical user interface (GUI) apps. However, there are several terminal apps available that offer lightweight, reliable, and efficient alternatives to their GUI counterparts. If you're willing to venture into the world of command line tools, you might find that they streamline your workflow and save you time.

Here are five MacOS command line tools that I swear by. One of the most useful command line tools I've come across is pandoc, a file conversion tool that makes it easy to convert files from one type to another. With pandoc, you can convert files without having to open a GUI app, making the process much faster.

Pandoc is available as a pkg installation package that you can download from the official GitHub site. Once installed, you can use pandoc to convert files with a simple command. For example, to convert a .txt file to a .docx file, you can use the command: pandoc input.txt -o output.docx.

Another tool that's become indispensable to me is taskwarrior, a command-line to-do list app that allows you to manage tasks quickly and efficiently. With taskwarrior, you can add tasks, view tasks, and mark tasks as done, all from the comfort of your terminal. To install taskwarrior, you'll need to have Homebrew installed, and then you can add the app with the command: brew install taskwarrior.

Once installed, you can add tasks with the command: task add do the dishes. For those interested in AI queries, Ollama is a local AI that you can install on your MacOS machine. With Ollama, you can pull any of the supported models and run your queries from the terminal app.

Ollama is powerful, private, and doesn't burden the power grid. To install Ollama, you can use Homebrew with the command: brew install ollama. Once installed, you can pull a model with the command: ollama pull MODEL.

In addition to these tools, I've also found the ag command and yt-dlp to be incredibly useful. The ag command allows you to search for strings within files, while yt-dlp enables you to download videos from YouTube. With ag, you can search multiple files for the same string, making it a powerful tool for finding specific information.

To install ag, you can use Homebrew with the command: brew install the_silver_searcher. yt-dlp can be installed along with the required ffmpeg with the command: brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg. These five command line tools have significantly improved my productivity and workflow on MacOS.

Whether you're looking to streamline your file conversion process, manage tasks more efficiently, or explore AI queries, there's a command line tool out there for you.