How to get the top most used CLI apps ?

I am trying to have information about my usage of tools, programs, apps, .. as I am preparing myself to upgrade from Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS once it lands in the near future. I already wrote about what I do after installing Ubuntu as a SWE .

Almost all what I will do can be done on macOS and Ubuntu Linux (and all other Linux distributions), because I will focus on Fish shell.

I am a curious programmer. I often research and analyze workflows and statistics and patterns for insights and meaning. I once compared GUI vs. CLI and now I prefer CLI. After I learned Go language, I tend to use it more often. But people on X (Twitter) always yelling “Rust is better”. I got curious and researched the realworld data to know if Go is used in production more than Rust or not .

Let’s reseach my history of commands in Fish shell!

list all commands I historically ran 🔗

I can list the whole history of commands I entered in Fish shell via:

history

filter the list of commands 🔗

I can filter the history to only show commands that start with “sudo” using grep:

history | grep "^sudo*"

But history program has this as a native functionality via a flag. Let’s use it!

history --prefix "sudo"

But what if I want to list all the commands that contain a specific program, not just starts with it?

history has a flag that do that too:

history --contains "find"

sort the list of history commands 🔗

But I want to sort these listed commands to have similar ones below each other. So, I can pipe those listed commands into sort program like this.

history --contains "find" | sort

save the list of commands 🔗

I want to save these sorted list of commands that contain (prefix/start with) ‘find’ into a plain text file. So, we’ll use command line redirection via > (replace contents of a file with it) or >> (append to the end of a file).

I prefer using >> when outputing into a file to avoid accidentally replace the whole text saved previously in the file.

The command will be like this:

history --contains "find" | sort >> find.txt

I can do the same thing with tesseract:

history --contains "tesseract" | sort >> tesseract.txt

The command will list all history commands that contain ’tesseract’ then sort them alphabetically, then direct the output to append at the end of this text file tesseract.txt. The plain text file will be created if it does not exist.

I can have all commands that starts with a specific program, or contains a specific program (or word), but what about have the top 50 uniq commands of the whole history?

Top 50 most used commands 🔗

I can list history, pipe it into awk to print only the first 3 columns (words), then pipe it to sort, then make sure it is uniq and counted, then re-sort it by the counts, then get the first 50 lines/commands only.

Here is the commands and the output on my laptop:

$ history | awk '{print $1 " " $2 " " $3 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -50
356 sudo apt install
155 git commit -m
100 sudo apt info
 78 go run .
 76 history | grep
 64 apt search --names-only
 54 sudo apt remove
 50 sudo snap install
 46 git clone --depth
 45 sudo apt search
 41 history | awk
 35 sudo snap info
 34 eza -l --color=always
 32 sudo snap remove
 32 ping -q -c
 32 git remote add
 29 gitp "content: +
 25 gitp "build: upgrade
 23 gitp "feature: +
 22 gitp "docs: +
 21 find . -name
 21 du -hd 1
 20 gitc "docs: +
 19 sudo systemctl status
 19 sudo rm -r
 19 sudo apt-get install
 18 pnpx @tailwindcss/cli -i
 18 apt list --installed
 17 sudo snap connect
 17 sudo apt upgrade
 16 grep -rnw .
 16 go build -o
 15 go mod init
 15 gitp "ui: +
 15 find ~ -name
 15 docker run --rm
 14 sudo systemctl restart
 14 gitp "ui: show
 13 sudo chown -R
 13 sudo apt update
 13 gitp "refactor: use
 13 gitp "refactor: remove
 13 gitc "feature: support
 12 sudo snap refresh
 12 sudo apt list
 12 git config --global
 12 ffmpeg -i Screencast\
 11 sudo snap search
 11 go run main.go
 11 go mod tidy

deciphering what these 50 commands mean 🔗

So, I can conclude that I mostly use:

• apt (system package manager)

  • to install programs/packages: sudo apt install vim
  • to show information/details about a package: sudo apt info vim
  • to search for a package: apt search --names-only "vim" or sudo apt search "vim"
  • to remove/uninstall a program/package: sudo apt remove vim
  • to list all installed programs/packages: apt list --installed
  • to upgrade a program sudo apt upgrade google-chrome-stable
  • to update local index (indeces): sudo apt update
  • sudo apt list

• git (source version control)

  • git commit -m "docs: blah blah"
  • git clone --depth 1 --recursive -b main https://github.com/abanoubha/UbuntuSetup.git
  • git remote add origin https://github.com/abanoubha/UbuntuSetup.git
  • git config --global pull.rebase false

• gitp (a git wrapper function I wrote in Fish)

  • gitp "feature: chat system"
  • gitp "build: upgrade libs"
  • gitp "content: + post"
  • gitp "docs: + commands"
  • gitp "ui: + CTA at the bottom"
  • gitp "refactor: use x instead of y"

• gitc (a git wrapper function I wrote in Fish)

  • gitc "docs: + cmds"
  • gitc "feature: support Arabic language in UI as display language"

• Go (programming language)

  • run the program from inside the project: go run .
  • build executable program: go build -o main ./... or go build -o main . or go build -o prog .
  • initialize Go project: go mod init github.com/abanoubha/timetracker
  • run a specific file: go run main.go
  • get and update libraries/dependencies: go mod tidy

• history (list of all commands executed)

  • history | grep "^sudo*"
  • history | awk '{print $1 " " $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -50

• grep

  • grep -rnw . -e "@AndroidEntryPoint"

• snap (universal system package manager by Canonical)

  • install a program: sudo snap install nvim
  • show information about a program: sudo snap info nvim
  • remove/uninstall a program: sudo snap remove nvim
  • connect snaps: sudo snap connect obs-studio:removable-media
  • upgrade all snap packages/programs: sudo snap refresh
  • search for snap packages/programs: sudo snap search vim

• eza

  • eza -l --color=always --group-directories-first

• ping

  • ping -q -c 12 google.com

• find

  • find . -name "*kitty*" 2> /dev/null
  • find ~ -name "*resolve*" 2> /dev/null

• du

  • du -hd 1 2> /dev/null | sort -hr

• systemctl

  • sudo systemctl status tailscaled
  • sudo systemctl restart tailscaled

• rm

  • sudo rm -r ~/blah

• apt-get

  • sudo apt-get install vim

• pnpx

  • pnpx @tailwindcss/cli -i ./src/input.css -o ./public/style.css --minify

• docker

  • docker run --rm -p 7860:7860 dia-cpu

• chown

  • sudo chown -R $USER:$USER ~/sampleDir

• ffmpeg

  • ffmpeg -i Screencast\ from\ 2025-06-08\ 03-32-34.webm -vf "scale=iw*4:ih*4" card-color-themes-4x.webm

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