Linux Tools & Utilities
Curated coverage of Linux tools and utilities for Ubuntu — terminal emulators, screenshot editors, image processors, system monitors, and small apps that earn a permanent place in your workflow.
Every Ubuntu user accumulates a personal toolkit — the handful of applications and command-line utilities that you install on every fresh system before you consider it “set up.” This section covers those tools: terminal emulators, screenshot apps, image processors, system monitors, text editors, and the oddball utilities that solve one specific problem so well that you can’t imagine life without them. We don’t review everything with a .deb package; we cover the tools we’ve actually used, configured, and relied on across multiple Ubuntu releases. For the underlying system knowledge that makes these tools work — package management, filesystem configuration, kernel modules — our Documentation section is the reference layer.
Terminal Emulators
The default GNOME Terminal is fine. Genuinely fine. But “fine” isn’t what keeps you in the terminal for hours, and if you spend serious time in a shell, your terminal emulator matters more than you’d expect.
GNOME Terminal and Console
Ubuntu 24.04 ships GNOME Console (formerly GNOME Terminal) with profiles for custom color schemes, keyboard shortcuts, and transparency. It does what it needs to. The biggest limitation: no split panes or tabs in the tiling sense — you’re relying on tmux or screen for that.
Tilix
Tilix is a tiling terminal emulator that lets you split your terminal window into multiple panes without needing tmux. It’s D-Bus aware, supports profiles per pane, and has a quake-mode dropdown that some users swear by. Installation is straightforward:
sudo apt install tilix
The main selling point is visual pane management — drag to resize, click to focus, keyboard shortcuts to split. If your workflow involves monitoring logs in one pane while running commands in another, Tilix is worth the five seconds it takes to install.
Cool Retro Term
Purely aesthetic. Cool Retro Term mimics old CRT monitors with scanlines, phosphor glow, screen curvature, and flicker effects. It’s completely impractical for actual work and absolutely delightful to look at. The scrollback is unlimited (which is more than some “serious” terminals offer), and the performance is surprisingly reasonable given all the OpenGL effects.
sudo apt install cool-retro-term
Is it a productivity tool? No. Does it make people stop and ask “what is that?” every time they see your screen? Yes. Sometimes that’s enough.
Screenshot and Image Tools
Shutter
For years, Shutter was the screenshot tool on Ubuntu: capture a window, a region, or the full screen, then annotate it with arrows, boxes, text, and highlights without opening GIMP. Its history is bumpy — it was removed from Ubuntu repos for a while due to deprecated Perl library dependencies, then came back, then moved to Flatpak for newer systems.
On Ubuntu 24.04, the cleanest install path is:
sudo apt install shutter
If the repo version is outdated or missing features, the Flatpak from Flathub is the alternative. Shutter’s editing mode remains the fastest way to annotate a screenshot without launching a full image editor. If you write documentation, tutorials, or bug reports, it earns its place.
GNOME Screenshot and Flameshot
GNOME’s built-in screenshot tool (accessible via Print Screen) handles basic capture well. For more control — delayed captures, region selection with pixel-level precision, in-tool annotation — Flameshot is the community favorite:
sudo apt install flameshot
Flameshot’s UI is intuitive: capture a region, then immediately draw arrows, add text, blur sensitive areas, and copy to clipboard or save. It’s the tool we recommend for most users who want something between GNOME Screenshot and Shutter.
Batch Image Processing
When you need to resize, convert, or watermark hundreds of images, GUI tools become painful. The command-line approach:
# Resize all PNGs in current directory to 800px wide, preserving aspect ratio
for f in *.png; do convert "$f" -resize 800x "$f"; done
That uses ImageMagick, which you’ll want installed:
sudo apt install imagemagick
For a GUI approach, tools like Converseen and the older Redimages provide batch operations with drag-and-drop simplicity. ImageMagick’s convert and mogrify commands handle the heavy lifting either way — Converseen is essentially a frontend for the same libraries.
System Monitoring
htop and btop
top is always available, but htop is what you’ll actually want to use:
sudo apt install htop
Color-coded process list, tree view, mouse support (yes, in the terminal), and the ability to kill processes without memorizing PIDs. It’s the first package most Linux users install on a new system, and for good reason.
btop takes the concept further with a dashboard-style interface: CPU, memory, disk, and network graphs in a single terminal window. It’s prettier than htop, uses slightly more resources, and provides more information at a glance.
sudo apt install btop
For server monitoring, both work over SSH with no X forwarding needed — which matters when you’re diagnosing performance issues on a headless machine.
Disk Usage: ncdu and Baobab
When / fills up and you need to find out where the space went:
sudo apt install ncdu
sudo ncdu /
ncdu (NCurses Disk Usage) scans the filesystem and presents an interactive, sorted list of directories by size. Navigate with arrow keys, press d to delete. It’s faster and more useful than running du -sh */ | sort -h repeatedly.
For a graphical equivalent, GNOME Disks and Baobab (Disk Usage Analyzer) provide sunburst diagrams that make it visually obvious which directories are consuming space. Baobab is installed by default on Ubuntu Desktop.
Text Editors (Beyond the Defaults)
Ubuntu ships with nano for terminal editing and GNOME Text Editor for the desktop. Both are adequate. But “adequate” is a low bar, and most users eventually want more.
Vim and Neovim
We’re not going to start the editor war. Vim is pre-installed on most Ubuntu systems as vi. If you want the full version:
sudo apt install vim
Neovim (nvim) is the modern fork with better defaults, Lua-based configuration, and a thriving plugin ecosystem. If you’re starting fresh with a modal editor, Neovim is the one to learn:
sudo apt install neovim
The learning curve is real — expect a week of frustration before you start to feel productive. But once modal editing clicks, you’ll wonder how you ever edited text without it. Or you won’t, and that’s fine too. Use whatever makes you fast.
Micro
If you want a terminal editor that doesn’t require memorizing keybindings, Micro is the answer:
sudo apt install micro
It uses standard keybindings (Ctrl+S to save, Ctrl+Q to quit, Ctrl+C to copy), has syntax highlighting, mouse support, and a plugin system. Think of it as what nano should have been. We recommend it to anyone who needs to edit config files on a server and doesn’t want to learn Vim.
Utilities You Didn’t Know You Needed
tldr
Man pages are comprehensive and dense. tldr (Too Long; Didn’t Read) provides community-maintained cheat sheets for common commands:
sudo apt install tldr
tldr tar
Instead of reading man tar (which is… extensive), tldr tar gives you the five most common tar invocations with examples. It’s a complement to man pages, not a replacement — but for quick “how do I extract a .tar.gz again?” lookups, it’s invaluable.
fzf
A command-line fuzzy finder that transforms how you interact with your shell. Type Ctrl+R with fzf installed and you get an interactive, searchable command history. Pipe any list into fzf and you can filter interactively:
find /etc -name "*.conf" | fzf
Installation:
sudo apt install fzf
Once you’ve used fzf for a week, a shell without it feels broken.
ripgrep (rg)
A faster grep that respects .gitignore, searches recursively by default, and highlights matches. If you search codebases or log files regularly:
sudo apt install ripgrep
rg "error" /var/log/syslog
It’s not a small difference in speed — on large directory trees, rg is dramatically faster than grep -r. The defaults are also better: colored output, line numbers, sensible file type filters.
Finding More Tools
The tools above represent our most-used, most-recommended utilities. Each one has been installed on real Ubuntu systems, tested across multiple LTS releases, and chosen because it solves a real problem better than the alternatives.
For installation guides with more detail — including version-specific notes, configuration tips, and common pitfalls — check the individual tool pages in this section. For the system fundamentals that underpin everything (package management, permissions, filesystems), visit the Documentation section. And for task-oriented walkthroughs that use these tools in context, browse the Step-by-Step Guides.