Command Line Tools I Like (2022)

Last updated: Wed Jul 17 2024

Despite being primarily an iOS developer, I use the command line quite a bit - I guess old habits from my time as an embedded software intern die hard. That said, I like a number of modern command line tools, many written in Rust, which are typically blazing fast and have better command-line interfaces than traditional Unix tools.

If you like this list, you might also like Julia Evan’s more comprehensive list!

neovim

I have a noted love for vim, but when I’m not using an IDE with a vim mode, I’m actually typically using neovim, alias nvim, which is a modern reimplementation of vim with much less technical debt, a scripting engine based on Lua instead of notoriously-idiosyncratic vimscript, and reasonable defaults like syntax highlighting enabled by default. It also has a full implementation of the Language Server Protocol, which enables it to have very rich, Visual Studio Code-esque plugins.

fzf

fzf is a command-line fuzzy finder; given some input, fzf lets you search through the input with a fuzzy matching search term. One use I find for this is my custom git alias for a fancy branch switcher, git b, which lets me fuzzy-search for branch names when I want to switch branches.

It’s also useful on its own! It can helpfully install a replacement for your terminal’s Ctrl+R to fuzzy-search previous commands, as well as a Ctrl+T command to fuzzy-search files in the current directory (although, to be honest, I usually find this option less than effective).

bat

bat is described as a “cat(1) clone with wings”. cat is technically supposed to be for concatenating text, but more often it’s simply used to print a file to the command line. bat leans into that usage by automatically piping large files into a pager, as well as adding syntax highlighting and git integration. I have cat aliased to bat.

exa

exa is a modern replacement for ls. Although I do think it has more reasonable defaults than ls, I really only use it for one reason: the pretty colours! I have ls aliased to exa.

rg

ripgrep, aka rg, is a grep tool; it allows you to efficiently search the full text of all files in a directory using regular expressions. Admittedly, it’s often more convenient to use a real IDE’s search function, but rg works everywhere and is blazingly fast.

fd

fd is a modern replacement for find. Unlike rg, which searches the full text of files, fd just searches filenames. This is useful in large codebases where you know roughly what a file is named but don’t know what directory it lives in. fd has a more intuitive command-line interface than find and even ignores files in your .gitignore by default! I have find aliased to fd.

Notably, some of this behavior is also provided by fzf, but I usually find fd much more effective in actually finding what I want.

delta

Don’t you wish your command-line git diff was as pretty as Github? Well, now it can be! delta makes git diff output much prettier, with word-level highlighting, line numbers, and an optional side-by-side mode.

tldr

tldr is a utility that provides community-maintained help pages for command-line tools, meant to complement traditional man pages, which are typically verbose. Instead, tldr provides a quick cheat-sheet for common use cases. I use the tealdeer implementation of tldr.

zoxide

zoxide is a replacement for cd, inspired by z, that lets you jump around quickly. At a basic level, it can completely emulate the behavior of typical cd. However, you can also give it a fuzzy search term, and it will use a “frecency” algorithm to determine which directory, anywhere on your system, to jump to. I have cd aliased to z, the binary for zoxide.

zoxide also has an interactive mode that uses fzf to fuzzy-find recent directory paths. I have that functionality aliased to cdi, though I haven’t gotten in the habit of using it yet.

httpie

HTTPie is a recent discovery. I don’t need to use curl very often to make HTTP requests, but when I do, it’s always a bit painful to remember the syntax. HTTPie has a much more obvious command-line interface and also built-in support for making HTTPS requests.