Command Line Tools for 2023

I like to use the command line, perhaps because I “always bet on text”. Here are a few of the command line tools I use the most heavily.

Essentials

There are a few command-line tools I use so heavily that I’m genuinely not sure how I would be productive without them.

git

Well, duh. Where would we even be as software engineers without git?

That said, I like to set a lot of aliases in my .gitconfig, like:

• git bd: branch delete, searching for branches with fzf
• git c: checkout branch, searching for branches with fzf
• git cam: commit all with message
• git camp: commit all with message and push
• git ci: checkout interactively; pick-and-choose files to git checkout with fzf -m
• git d: diff with better behavior (showing staged and unstaged changes)
• git df: diff with another branch by finding with fzf
• git dfn: diff with another branch by finding with fzf, showing name-only
• git l: show the log with one-line format
• git lf: show the log and find a commit with fzf
• git lfc: show the log, find a commit with fzf, and copy to pasteboard
• git m: merge branch, finding branches with fzf
• git p: push
• git s: show status
• git unstage: unstage the listed files
• git oops: squash changes with the last commit, because I committed too early

fzf

fzf is up there with git as one of the miracles of command-line productivity. You throw it lines of text - usually piped in from somewhere else - and it presents a fancy, and highly customizable, fuzzy-find interface. As you can see above, that’s extremely useful when writing little shell scripts.

However, what I use it for most often is actually its Ctrl-R / Ctrl-T functionality. By default, Ctrl-R replaces the shell’s built-in search, using fzf to fuzzy-find previous commands, even from days or weeks ago. Ctrl-T, meanwhile, performs a recursive fuzzy-find of filenames in the current directory and subdirectories, which is perfect to quickly pull up files by name regardless of the exact path.

rg

rg is my all-purpose, cross-repo search tool. Throw a regex at rg and it’ll chew through files looking for it, even respecting .gitignore files! I end up using it instead of my IDE’s search tool almost always - it’s just much more effective at actually finding what I’m looking for, and even works in plaintext situations, like if I need to search an Obsidian vault.

tmux

One of these days I’ll get around to writing up why I adopted tmux, but suffice to say I found my ~week of investment in learning tmux worthwhile, not least because I can operate a terminal without lifting my hands from the keyboard at all. When I’m running a terminal these days, I’m almost always running tmux. Among the benefits it offers:

• tmux can split the window with a simple hotkey, regardless of where it’s being run.
• Since tmux works on a client-server model, the shell keeps running even if you close the window.
• There’s a lot of utility just in having a pretty large scrollback buffer that you can save and search.

I also use a few plugins:

• tmux-resurrect/tmux-continuum: Together, these plugins will automatically save the state of the tmux session and automatically restore it when you restart.
• tmux-open: Just press “o” while a file or URL is highlighted in tmux to open it. That combines particulary well with the built-in regex searches; I have a few particular searches (e.g. for URLs) bound to various keys.
• tmux-yank: This makes the copying behavior work a little better, notably while opening tmux via a VS Code terminal.
• vim-tmux-navigator: This lets me use Ctrl-h/Ctrl-j/Ctrl-k/Ctrl-l to navigate around tmux splits and Neovim sessions.

Preferred

These are command-line tools I’ve been using a lot later that I would find inconvenient to switch away from.

• fish: I’m not convinced that fish, the “friendly interactive shell”, is radically better than, say, zsh with oh-my-zsh, but it does start up much faster, has nicer autocompletions by default, and has a much less confusing shell scripting language.
• neovim: These days I use VS Code for most code editing - making Neovim work like an IDE is just too painful - but when I just need to quickly open and edit a file, I still fall back on it. I use a handful of plugins - notably vim-tmux-navigator to make it play nicer with tmux - but otherwise I try to keep its configuration pretty minimal.
• delta: This little utility makes git diff output much prettier, with word-level highlighting, line numbers, and an optional side-by-side mode. It can even be used outside a git context as a replacement for diff in general! zoxide: This is one of a couple different tools that remembers which directories you’ve previously visited, so you can cd to them without typing out the full path. For instance, I can just go z dot and I’ll jump to ~/Developer/dotfiles. I actually have this aliased directly to cd - going back to cd would be really annoying.
• just: I used to write little Makefiles encapsulating various useful commands for a project. Unfortunately, thanks to its history as a build tool, make has many well-known rough edges, like the requirement for .PHONY rules. just is a tool that basically provides Makefiles without the build system. That may not sound useful, and Hacker News types mock it every time it’s posted, but I still like to make one for almost every repo. A great example where it’s useful is with hledger, a plain-text accounting system with a, uh, convoluted CLI - I can turn a command like hledger is -D -p "from 7 days ago" -f 2023.journal into just daily, and it’s helpfully documented directly in the justfile.
• cheat/tldr: These are similar tools for sharing command-line cheatsheets. cheat allows you to manage your own cheatsheets, while I’ve found tldr’s community-contributed cheatsheets to be high quality. I use both.

Modernized Unix Tools

I use a few standard Unix utilies that I’ve aliased to more modern versions.

• bat (for cat): A few of the other tools like to send output through cat, and every so often it’s useful to splat a file to the command line. In those instances I use bat instead of cat, because its output is a bit nicer and it automatically pipes to a pager like less if the output is too long.
• exa (for ls): It’s ls with pretty colors and icons! Frankly I don’t have a strong reason to prefer this over bog-standard ls, but the colors are nice.
• sd (for sed): I often do search-and-replace through an IDE, but sometimes it’s nice to do it from the command line and just check git diff for changes. Unfortunately sed makes absolutely no sense to me. sd is a simple alternative with a better interface for the common case.
• fd (for find): fd works almost identically to find, but it’s a bit faster and, like rg, respects .gitignore files by default. In particular, I have fzf’s Ctrl-T hotkey set up to use fd by default.
• HTTPie: This is a straightforward replacement for good ol’ curl or wget for making basic HTTP requests, but I prefer it to curl because the command-line interface makes a lot more sense.
• dust (for du): Every so often I need to check why a directory is so big, and in those instances I turn to dust, a modern replacement for du with prettier output.

Situationally Useful

I don’t use this often, but they’re helpful when I do need them.

• gh: Did you know GitHub has a fully-featured CLI that can access basically any GitHub API? That said, in practice, I rarely need many of the features gh provides, but it does do a couple cool things:
  • gh repo create --source . will create a new repo on GitHub from the current directory, assuming it’s a git repository. That’s especially useful if I create a new project locally and then decide I want to push it to GitHub.
  • gh pr view -w opens the PR for the current branch, if any, in the web browser.
• tig: This is a pretty git viewer, but I mainly use it for tig stash, which lets me interactively explore my git stash.
• jq: I know a lot of folks love jq for working with JSON, but frankly I find it a pain to work with - its filter syntax is so idiosyncratic that I feel lost every time I pull it up. That said, when I do need to work with JSON, jq is the obvious place to go; even just piping JSON output through jq for pretty printing is useful.
• terminal-notifier: I don’t often need to trigger desktop push notifications from a shell script, but when I do, terminal-notifier is the place to go.
• watchexec: This is a cute little Rust tool that watches a file and reruns a command any time the watched file changes. I don’t realistically have a use for that, but if I ever do, watchexec is where I’ll turn first.