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10 Tools To Power Up Your Command Line

Darren Burns on January 03, 2019

This post is the first in a series of showcases of some of the best non-standard command line tools I've discovered in recent years. If you ever ma...

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Mario Nebl • Jan 6 '19

Nice posts, thanks for the mention of svg-term-cli. I just wanted to point out that svg-term-cli does not require remote asciicasts to work.

You also have the option to pass an asciinema recording via stdin, e.g.

asciinema rec cast.json
cat cast.json | svg-term-cli

Cheers

Darren Burns • Jan 8 '19

Thanks for the heads up Mario :)

I've updated the post!

Pierre-Adrien Buisson • Jan 8 '19

Thanks for this list! I already use several of those, but some of them I didn't know. z is my favorite of the batch, use it all the time, it's a huge time saver! I also use fzf daily through the vim plugin as my default fuzzy file finder and it works great, same for bat, very useful.

As for asciinema, I noticed that on your blog, my Firefox does not render the ascii clips correctly (even though I turned all content blocking off, and the clips are rendered correctly on asciinema website).

Darren Burns • Jan 8 '19

Not sure why they don't work on Firefox :( Thanks for the heads up though. I moved back to using gifs for parts 2 and 3.

Pierre-Adrien Buisson • Jan 8 '19

My pleasure! Thanks again for this article, I went and read the whole series on your blog and found many other useful tools, once again quite a bunch that I already but also new ones I'll be testing soon ;)

Mario Nebl • Jan 9 '19

Hey Pierre, any chance you could file the bug you see as issue with svg-term-cli? A screenshot of the problem and the exact FF version would be super nice.

Pierre-Adrien Buisson • Jan 9 '19

Hey Mario! Sure, can do. I'll do it right now, happy to help.

rhymes • Jan 5 '19

z is definitely one of my favourites, don't use cd that much anymore. Fun fact:

➜  ~ z -l | sort -n -r | head -1
8420       /Users/rhymes/Dev/devto

bat I've aliased to cat already, wrk is the coolest and ripgrep made me replace ack.

Didn't know about the others. I've installed exa, fd and bench.

Thank you!

I feel like Rust is there for fast and powerful command line tools :D

Vincent Milum Jr • Jan 3 '19

Some really cool stuff here! I personally just wish more of these were available on FreeBSD rather than requiring macOS.

Darren Burns • Jan 3 '19

Thanks!

jesusjbr • Jan 5 '19

These good CLI tools mostly are written in Rust. That alone give him some credit for me (in Rust we trust). Nice compilation, this is one of the best post that I've read in dev.too.

miku86 • Jan 8 '19

Hey Darren,

thanks for your post.

I love z for the terminal.

I also love ranger as my file manager, where I set some shortcuts for specific places like "Go to Home" (gh), "Go to External Devices" (ge) etc.

Moreover I use trash-cli, so that I can delete files from the terminal savely into to the Trash.

jhspetersson • Jan 8 '19

You could probably like my tiny tool to search files with SQL queries. Another find replacement written in Rust as well.

github.com/jhspetersson/fselect

Darren Burns • Jan 8 '19

This is fantastic, I love it! Thanks for posting it :)

RAYNAL JR • Jan 4 '19

How does ripgrep compare to ag? I use the silver searcher almost exclusively :). Combined with fish shell wildcards that's a killer combo! I am looking forward to try some of these though.

Darren Burns • Jan 4 '19

BurntSushi (the author of rg) made a huge blog post you might be interested in.

He compares it to and benchmarks it against tools like silver searcher etc: blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep

Sal Hernandez • Feb 10 '19

OMG! These are some dope tools! I just installed fzf, exa, bat, & fd!

I added the aliases below to my shell profile to introduce them seamlessly into my workflow! 😀

alias cat="bat"
alias find="fd"
alias ls="exa"
alias ll="ls -alF"

Thanks for sharing this Darren! This is def going to help me boost up my workflow.

Cristian Baluta • Jan 8 '19

The most useful cmd for me is Jit github.com/ralcr/Jit, it allows me to make git commits with 'jit magic Blah blah' instead 3 commands. It also allows me to create branches from jira issues and switch branches by typing only the number of the task

Renato Suero • Jan 3 '19

Like Ryan, I too always read posts to finding out new tools and I'd like to suggest Tig maybe it can be useful

Darren Burns • Jan 3 '19

Glad you found it useful ☺️

Tig looks cool, I'll check it out!

Vincent Milum Jr • Jan 4 '19

By default, FreeBSD doesn't use bash Shell, it uses tcsh. Yes, it's possible to switch, but then all of the features of tcsh go bye bye, which is the entire "feel" of FreeBSD. the other thing is that a couple of these I looked into have not been ported to FreeBSD at all yet.

Edward • Jan 5 '19

Thanks for your sharing!
Very useful :)

Muhammad • Jan 8 '19

Cool
You mentioned great tools

jan paul • Jan 7 '19

nice job darren, bookmarked! :-)

Hugo • Jan 8 '19

Thanks!
I installed bat but doesn't detect React syntaxis. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Darren Burns • Jan 8 '19

Hi Hugo,

Thanks for your comment :)

It might be worth creating an issue over in the bat GitHub repo if you can't get JSX syntax to work. The project is supposed to highlight JSX, as there's a syntax file for it: github.com/sharkdp/bat/blob/566aab...

Hugo • Jan 11 '19

Thanks!
I found out what the problem was. The files need to have the jsx extension

Chris Moon • Jan 8 '19

I know what I'm doing when I get into work tomorrow!

goodbytes • Jan 5 '19

These are great, thanks Darren! The only thing I notice is that I tend to forget about all these cool commands rather quickly. Bookmarked your post to refresh my memory!

Kyle Galbraith • Jan 3 '19

Awesome post Darren! I'm going to have to give wrk a try on my next project.

Darren Burns • Jan 3 '19

Thanks Kyle :)

Junsuk Park • Jan 8 '19

Thank you for sharing :) Really helpful!

Ryan Palo • Jan 3 '19

I always love these posts about tools recommendations. I love finding out about new, useful commands! I hadn't seen a lot of these! Thanks for sharing :)

Darren Burns • Jan 3 '19

Thanks Ryan, glad you enjoyed it!

Corey Alexander • Jan 3 '19

Thanks for the post! Love me some good cli tools and there were a couple here that were new to me, gonna have to try them out!

Darren Burns • Jan 3 '19

Glad you found it useful Corey, hopefully they help you :)

Edwin Klesman • Jan 8 '19

Hey Darren, really love this collection. Earned my ❤️💯.

I think that z and fzf will be the greatest timesavers for me personally. But I'll check out the others too :)

Thanks for sharing 🙌🏻

Darren Burns • Jan 8 '19

You're welcome, happy to hear you enjoyed it!

mnemos • Jan 4 '19

Beautiful! Loved this tut!

Darren Burns • Jan 4 '19

Thank you! I'll be posting another one soon :)

Hank Chan • Jan 9 '19

Since you mentioned fzf, allow me to introduce a small CLI tool I wrote, npm-fzf. It makes npm commands easier with fzf.

github.com/hankchanocd/npm-fzf

Jeet Ray • Jan 5 '19

I personally use fasd rather than z; it includes several similar tools as well, all attached to their respective tools, such as the original z, j, being the commend this time!