How SmallUtils Streamlines Everyday Tasks for Power UsersSmallUtils is a compact suite of lightweight utilities designed for users who demand speed, precision, and minimal overhead. Geared toward power users — developers, system administrators, productivity enthusiasts, and anyone who prefers efficient, scriptable tools — SmallUtils focuses on doing a few things extremely well rather than offering a bloated, all-in-one solution.
What SmallUtils Is (and Isn’t)
SmallUtils is a collection of small, focused command-line and GUI utilities that solve specific problems: text manipulation, file management, quick conversions, clipboard enhancements, lightweight automation, and small network tools. It’s not a full desktop environment or heavy IDE; it aims to augment existing workflows with fast, reliable helpers that can be combined into larger solutions.
Core Principles
- Minimal dependencies and small footprint: utilities start quickly and don’t bloat your system.
- Composability: tools are designed to work well together and with shell pipelines.
- Predictability: consistent behavior, clear options, and sensible defaults.
- Portability: available across platforms or easy to compile/run on different systems.
- Scriptability: straightforward exit codes and output formats (plain text, JSON) for automation.
Key Utilities and How Power Users Use Them
Below are representative SmallUtils utilities and concrete examples of how power users leverage them.
- Text and string tools
- trimlines — remove leading/trailing whitespace and blank lines. Example: cleaning pasted config snippets before committing.
cat snippet.txt | trimlines > cleaned.txt - rgrep — faster, focused search with colorized output and column numbers; ideal for large codebases.
rgrep "TODO" src/ | head
- File and directory helpers
- fselect — fuzzy file selector for scripts and quick file-open actions.
vim $(fselect src/*.py) - dups — detect duplicate files by hash, optionally hardlink or remove duplicates.
dups --hash md5 ~/Downloads --delete
- Clipboard and snippet utilities
- cliphist — maintain a searchable history of clipboard entries with timestamps.
cliphist search "password" | cliphist copy 3 - snip — store tiny reusable snippets with tags; integrate with shell prompts.
snip add --tag git "git checkout -b"
- Quick converters and formatters
- tojson / fromjson — validate and pretty-print JSON or convert CSV to JSON for quick API tests.
cat data.csv | tojson --header | jq . - units — convert units inline (e.g., MB↔MiB, km↔mi).
units 5.2GB --to MiB
- Lightweight networking tools
- pingb — batch ping multiple hosts and summarize latency.
pingb hosts.txt --summary - httppeek — fetch HTTP headers and status without downloading full bodies.
httppeek https://example.com
Example Workflows
- Quick code review checklist
- Combine rgrep, trimlines, and snip to find problematic patterns, clean snippets, and paste standard review comments.
rgrep "console.log" src/ | awk -F: '{print $1}' | sort -u | xargs -I{} sh -c 'trimlines {} | sed -n "1,5p"'
- Daily notes and snippets sync
- Use fselect to pick today’s note, cliphist to pull recent links, and snip to paste templated headers.
vim $(fselect ~/notes/*.md) & cliphist recent 5 | snip add --stdin --tag links snip paste note-header >> $(fselect ~/notes/*.md)
- Rapid data inspection
- Convert a CSV export to JSON and inspect it with jq and tojson.
cat export.csv | tojson --header | jq '.[0:5]'
Integration with Existing Tools
SmallUtils is intentionally designed to play well with:
- Shells: bash, zsh, fish (friendly options and sensible exit codes).
- Editors: Vim, Neovim, VS Code (commands to open files, insert snippets).
- Automation: Makefiles, cron jobs, CI scripts (non-interactive flags and machine-readable outputs).
Example: Use dups in a CI job to ensure no large duplicate artifacts are committed.
dups --hash sha256 build/ --max-size 10M --report duplicates.json Performance and Resource Efficiency
Because SmallUtils focuses on small tasks, each tool is optimized for low memory usage and fast startup. This makes them ideal for:
- Servers with constrained resources.
- Quick command-line interactions where latency matters.
- Scripting contexts where spawning heavy processes would be costly.
Customization and Extensibility
Power users can extend SmallUtils by:
- Writing wrapper scripts that chain utilities.
- Using configuration files to set defaults (e.g., color schemes, default hash algorithms).
- Contributing plugins or small modules where supported (many utilities expose hooks or plugin APIs).
Example config (~/.smallutils/config):
[defaults] color = true hash = sha256 clip_history = 200 When SmallUtils Is the Right Choice
- You want tools that start instantly and don’t require a GUI.
- You prefer simple composable utilities over monolithic apps.
- You manage remote servers, work in terminals, or automate repetitive tasks.
- You value predictable, scriptable behavior and portability.
Limitations and When Not to Use It
- Not ideal if you need full-featured GUIs for heavy data visualization.
- Not a replacement for full IDEs when deep debugging, refactoring, or project-wide analysis is required.
- Some power-user workflows might still require combining with larger tools (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes CLIs).
Getting Started
- Install via package manager (if available) or download binaries.
- Add SmallUtils to your PATH.
- Read the quickstart to learn core commands and flags.
- Start by replacing one small daily tool (clipboard manager, file selector) to evaluate fit.
SmallUtils is a toolbox philosophy: small, reliable pieces that snap together into powerful workflows. For power users who value speed and composability, it becomes an amplifier — the right small tool at the right moment saves minutes every day, which quickly adds up to significant time reclaimed.
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