Many people are missing out on really cool free
software tools just because they are command line based instead of having a graphic user
interface. But in this video, you'll see it's not so complicated. And some of the most useful
tools are like this, yet still easy to use. And I think you'll be surprised at how cool some of
these are. Oh and of course, all of these are free and most are open source too. So let's get into
it. Alright, so I want to start with this first one because it will make our lives easier for all
the rest, actually. The tool is called Cheat. And the idea is you create little "cheat sheets" to
remember how to use other command line tools. For example, say you want to convert a video with
FFmpeg, but can't remember how. You can just type "cheat ffmpeg" and it will show a list of examples
to help remind you. And you can customize this by editing a corresponding text file. The default
list for FFmpeg is pretty complicated. So what you saw was my own list. There's actually a big
collection of community contributed cheat sheets you'll have the option to download when you first
run it. Also, you can filter for commands that mention a phrase, for example, by doing "cheat
ffmpeg -s convert". And it only shows ones that say "convert". I also made a batch script, which
I can link to that makes it so I don't even need to use the -s. It builds the command for me. So
I can call that "c.bat" and then can just call "c ffmpeg convert". And that works too. Cheats
also has a whole tagging feature, but I'm not going to get into that. To add your own cheat
sheets, you just go into the "Personal" folder in the cheat sheets directory and create a file
with no extension with the name you want to use, and just add text however you want it to appear.
I might even create some cheat sheets for some of the programs I mentioned in this video. So
if I do, I'll put the links to those in the description as well. Now, speaking of really cool
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out. And with all that being said, let's continue. Okay, so now we can move on to cool tool number
two, which is YT-DLP, short for YouTube Download Plus. Like the name suggests, it lets you download
videos from YouTube, but also a whole bunch of other sites as well. Now, normally the commands
for this can be cumbersome, but fortunately for you all, I created yet another script for making
it way easier. This one happens to use Windows PowerShell. When you run it, you just paste in the
URL of the video and it outputs all the possible video and audio qualities, and then asks you
how you want to download it. For the most part, you'll just want to choose either one or two, and
then it will start the download and put it in a folder called outputs. It also supports playlists
and allows you to change what other parameters you want to use with YouTube Download Plus, but
that's more advanced. Now keep in mind, YTDLP has way more features than what my script supports.
Mine is just to make it easier for basic use, but you can look up on the GitHub repo for all the
other options if you want to get fancy. And there is a lot. Alright, next up we have an extremely
powerful tool called ImageMagick that lets you do pretty much anything imaginable in regards to
image files. Yes of course, you can do the basics of converting from one file type to another,
like by doing "magick input.jpg output.png", or you can resize by adding the parameter "-resize
50%" for example. But would you believe that there are over 300 total command line options? And they
can get super advanced. For example, don't you just hate it when you find yourself needing to set
the drawing transformation matrix on an image? And I don't know about you, but it seems like every
day I need to apply a Kuwahara radius to one of my photos. Well, of course, ImageMagick can do that
and more. ImageMagick includes several separate executables, but you mostly just need magick.exe.
Previously specific operations required dedicated commands like "convert", but now you can just do
"magick input.jpg output.png" for example. For certain functions, direct tools like identify.exe
can still be used, like "identify input.jpg", or equivalently through magick.exe, "magick
identify input.jpg". This simplifies the process, though awareness of both methods is beneficial if
you see examples with the older methods. I could spend hours on all the possible uses, but here are
some common things I use it for. If I need to make a jpeg file smaller, I can use the quality
parameter which goes from 0 to 100, and try lowering it as much as I can while making sure the
visual quality doesn't drop too much. You can also check to see what quality a jpeg file was saved at
by doing "magick identify -verbose" on an image, then looking at the quality value. This also shows
you a whole bunch of other info you probably don't need, but it's there. Next up is another extremely
powerful tool that you probably have heard of, which is FFmpeg, which is extremely popular
and used by a ton of common software behind the scenes. To put it simply, FFmpeg lets you do all
sorts of stuff to multimedia files like video and audio. This includes converting video and audio
formats, extracting or attaching audio tracks to a video, applying effects like pitch shifting
to audio tracks, and really anything else you can think of. That really doesn't even scratch
the surface. Again, because it can do so much, that means there's a ton of commands. So you'll
often find yourself googling stuff like "FFmpeg how to convert stereo to mono", but because
it's so popular, it's usually easy to find instructions. And funnily enough, there's actually
an online tool called FFmpeg Commander, which has a GUI where you can specify a bunch of stuff
you might want to do to some files with FFmpeg, and it will give you a command you need to use for
that. So that can come in handy. On to number 5, we have a useful tool by Microsoft for looking
up error messages called Err.exe. If you've ever gotten a weird error code in Windows with no
description, this can help. I actually made a whole video about this before that goes into way
more detail, but basically you just run the exe with the error code, and it spits out a bunch
of info about it. Now hold on, because yes, this looks like a mess, but what do you know, I
also made a batch script to improve this too. You just run the batch file instead using the same
error code. If you haven't seen my other video, this might not look any less confusing, but if
you don't have time for that, you can just look through these possible descriptions and see if any
of them might be a clue to the problem. Next up, number 6 is a program called ExifTool, which gets
its name from Exif data, a type of metadata. This lets you view and change the metadata on a whole
bunch of different file types, and not just image files, which are normally associated with Exif
data. The full list of file types it can handle metadata for is huge, even including stuff like
EXEs, Word documents, zip files, and a ton more. And actually there are various GUIs people have
made that work with ExifTool, which are linked from the official website. Some are more general
purpose, like ExifTool GUI v6, but others are GUIs for more specific purposes that just use a certain
feature of ExifTool. Anyway, for the average person, ExifTool has a few practical uses, such
as removing all metadata that isn't absolutely necessary, which can be done with this command.
Or you can manipulate metadata tags on different file types if you need to. You might not need to
do this very often, but it's very handy when you do. Alright, for number 7 we have a tool called
Pandoc, which is able to convert between basically any kind of document file type. I don't mean just
word documents and PDFs, but also other data types like JSON files, ebook files, and well, you can
see the entire list for yourself. And of course, it can do a lot more than what it just seems on
the surface. The documentation is miles long, because it supports a bunch of different options
for each file type, some of which are unique to that file type. Pandoc can be installed, but I
prefer the portable version, which you can get from the GitHub releases page. Then just look for
the Windows zip file option, and you can extract and run it from anywhere. Next up, numbers 8 and
9 are both sort of related, both having to do with PDF files. And those are PDFCPU and XPDF Tools.
For PDFCPU, this lets you manipulate PDFs in all sorts of useful ways. For example, you can use it
to extract all images or attachments from a PDF, as well as stuff like merging or splitting PDFs,
adding a watermark to a PDF, and a bunch more. You can look at the full list yourself. But
I think one of the coolest abilities is for when you come across some PDF that you want to
print or edit, but you can't because it has some dumb permission restrictions and it stops you.
Well, with one use of the "decrypt" command, you can just remove that protection without
even knowing the password. To be clear though, there are two types of PDF protections. One
is the kind that requires a password to even open and see the file, and unfortunately you can't
remove that because that's legitimately encrypted. But for the kind that just restricts you from
editing and printing, that's just a paper tiger. And even when you go to save a file like that,
Adobe Acrobat will warn you that other software might not respect these restrictions at all. So
that kind you can remove. Another major caveat, apparently there's a new PDF standard called PDF
2.0, which uses a different encoding scheme for protections that PDF CPU doesn't support yet. So
if you try to remove a password on a more recent PDF, it might say that it doesn't support PDF 2.0
encryption. They are adding more support for PDF 2.0 features over time though. So I'm sure that
it will be able to eventually. In the meantime, if all you need to do is print a protected PDF
though, you could use something like Sumatra PDF Reader, which I actually use myself. And
that doesn't seem to care about restrictions, at least for printing. As for the XPDF Tools,
this is a set of a bunch of different tools, each with a specific purpose, which their names
describe. Several of them are for converting PDFs into something else like PDF to HTML, PDF to
Text, PDF to PNG, as well as these other less common formats. PDFInfo shows you info about the
PDF, no surprise. PDFImages lets you extract all the images from the PDF. PDFDetach extracts
attachments, and PDFFonts extracts fonts. And of course for each of these, you have several
options, like if you want to only extract certain pages, that sort of thing. To download these,
you'd go to the download page for a program called XPDF Reader, but they have a separate
download for the XPDF Command Line tools, which are these ones that I showed. All right, we've
still got a couple more and we're up to number 10, which is a tool called Tokei. This one is simple,
but cool. And it lets you generate statistics about source code you've written or just have.
So if I run it on my Spammer Purge app directory, I can see that there are about 6,800 lines
of actual code, almost 900 comment lines, and it also breaks it down by language too.
There's also other options for how to format the output and gives you control over how it counts
everything too. So just a neat little tool. Okay, finally, at number 11, we have an interesting
tool called Hyperfine, which is for benchmarking the speed of other command line tools. So say I
want to see how long it takes to run Err.exe as an example. I do "Hyperfine" and then put in whatever
command you'd normally use to run the other tool, like the path to it and any parameters, then hit
enter. It will run a whole bunch of times and then spit out the results, in this case saying it
averaged out at around 20 milliseconds, as well as how many runs it did. I'm not sure I can think of
when I'd use this beyond curiosity, but it might be helpful if you want to optimize some other tool
that you use often that takes up a lot of time, by trying different settings or something.
At least it's cool to know that. And that's about it. I'd be curious which of these is your
favorite and how many of these you already knew about. And of course, if I missed any really good
ones, let me know down in the comments and check down there in case someone left a good suggestion.
Thanks again to Ugreen for sponsoring. Definitely check out the new Ugreen NASync Series through the
link in the description, where you can get up to 40% off for a limited time. If you enjoyed this
video, be sure to give it a big giant thumbs up for the YouTube algorithm. And if you want to keep
watching, the next video I'd recommend is where I talked about a whole bunch of cool portable free
programs. Everyone loves those. I'll put that link right there you can click on. So thanks so much
for watching and I'll see you in the next one.
