User:NetSysFire/Tip of the Day

(Draft) List for use with Talk:Main page#Idea: Tip of the day. This needs a lot of content.

Criteria for inclusion

It must be a lesser known fact. "rm is a utility to delete files" is too well known.
It should have some use. Exceptions exist for easter eggs. If this is ever finished, it would go into the main page and should leave the user with a positive "Cool, I learnt something." or "Heh, never knew that" impression.
Some fun easter eggs found in programs are welcome, but this should not be a list of entirely easter eggs, so use those sparingly.
Please do not add facts willy-nilly. I have to review them all, so use the talk page. Maintenance team members, maybe also packagers, may add without asking as they are trusted and less likely to add nonsense.
As only one will appear at a time/per day, make sure to add links even if the previous entry used the exact same wiki link.

List

ip(8) output can be very pretty by adding colors and suppressing details. Try ip -br -c a.
Testing graphics? xeyes(1) features a -biblicallyAccurate mode.
Pacman ships with a free elephant which can be accessed at /usr/bin/repo-elephant.
Bored of -Syu'ing? Use ILoveCandy in pacman.conf(5) to give pacman output a new look.
.pacnew files are sometimes a ticking time bomb. Take care of them on a regular basis to prevent issues.
Common readline key bindings, as seen in readline(3) § EDITING COMMANDS, such as Ctrl+w are well worth learning. Since readline is so commonly used in applications, you will be able to apply the newfound efficiency aplenty.
Need to test your connection to the router? ping _gateway automatically picks your default gateway (via nss-myhostname(8)).
Need to test your connection to the internet real quick? It can scarcely get any shorter than ping 1.1.
When constrained on space, remember you can avoid installing all translations provided by packages.
Rarely used services can often be socket-activated instead of keeping them idle all the time.
When extracting tar(1) archives, tar will automatically detect the used compression type, making flags like -z superfluous.
When connected using ssh, you can control some behavior using escape characters. For example, you may disconnect, increase verbosity or put it into the background. See ssh(1) § ESCAPE CHARACTERS.
This wiki can also be accessed offline using arch-wiki-docs or arch-wiki-lite.
The current kernel command-line parameters can always be accessed using cat /proc/cmdline.
Forgot how to use a certain command? https://cheat.sh can be accessed using both curl or any browser.
Testing repositories can be enabled only for searching with Usage = Search Sync in pacman.conf.
If you like colors in your terminal, you can add the --color=auto parameter to many tools.
Prefer using journalctl over dmesg(1), as journalctl has many advanced filtering options and features all the logs in one place. Often times, userspace applications output important and relevant messages, too, which can be easily overlooked when just looking at kernel messages.
systemd-analyze(1) is a very powerful tool. Slow system startup? Analyze it with systemd-analyze plot > something.svg and examine the file in e.g a browser. Gauging the sandboxing potential of a unit? systemd-analyze security unit
file(1) can identify most binary files, even when the file extension is inaccurate or missing. Furthermore, it will often display useful, basic metadata.
cal(1) displays the current calendar month in your terminal, with cal -3 displaying the previous and next month, too.
Dealing with a super weird and hard to debug issue? Leading as well as trailing whitespace is very hard to spot and can cause a variety of issues.