Nikhil Marathe has an interesting post on what he calls “Mystery Knowledge.” By Mystery Knowledge he means knowledge that you aren’t apt to discover on your own but that is easy to learn once it’s been pointed out and, when it has been pointed out, can make a big difference in your productivity.
Most of his post illustrates the point with some useful tools that make your day-to-day work easier. If you’re an old-timey command line guy, you’re reaction is probably, “Well yeah. Who doesn’t know about those?” But a lot of younger developers work mainly with browsers and GUI’s and have never come across things like the file command or wireshark. Marathe has a whole list of command line tools that can help with coding and debugging, even if you work mainly with a GUI.
When a tool is specific to a particular OS, Marathe identifies a similar tool for the other operating systems when one is available. It doesn’t matter if you work with Windows, Linux, or macOS; Marathe considers tools and techniques for all of them.
This is a nice post with a lot of valuable information. Even if you are one of the command line folks, it’s worth a read. You might learn about a command or command flag that you weren’t aware of.