Yes, there's other tools that can make terminal output prettier on Linux. We all know that. But the "column" command is likely already there, on your system, waiting for you to use it. With "column...
I doubt anyone has ever regretted spending some time familiarizing themselves with the POSIX, util-linux, and GNU coreutils commands. You can do a lot by just piping these (mostly) simple tools together.
Something else, all of the GNU coreutils have their own info [command] terminal command, and often the info page is incredibly easy to read, full of example pages and highly granular descriptions of flags, error messages, and the like.
I doubt anyone has ever regretted spending some time familiarizing themselves with the POSIX, util-linux, and GNU coreutils commands. You can do a lot by just piping these (mostly) simple tools together.
Something else, all of the GNU coreutils have their own
info [command]terminal command, and often the info page is incredibly easy to read, full of example pages and highly granular descriptions of flags, error messages, and the like.Yeah GNU’s
infopages are often more detailed than themanpages.Is
awkthe best POSIX-compliantcolumnemulator?I would say sed.