Submitted by Jordan on
Two simple tools that will make your development a lot nicer: htop and bar.
Htop is a replacement for top, a command line tool that shows you what processes are running. It also shows you cpu load, free memory, etc. Htop does the same, but it's prettier:
Naturally, it's easy to install for Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install htop
For everyone else, there's Sourceforge.
Next up is bar. Simply put, bar gives you a progress bar:
It's good for file transfers or other operations that involve large files. I like to use it to load mysql dump files:
bar dumpfile.sql | mysql databasename
It gives you file transfer rate, eta, percentage done, and a pretty progress bar. The built-in mysql import command gives absolutely no feedback until the job is done, and if you have a 1 GB database, that's a lot of sitting around wondering if it's even working. Htop could help with that, but it won't tell you how long you have left. Bar's cool that way.
Of course bar is easy to install:
sudo apt-get install bar
Of course, both of these tools require the command line. If you're not using the command line yet, you should. These things are fun and fun is good.
J<
(Hat tip to Dr. Seuss.)