Florian Rand

Posted on Jan 14, 2020 • Edited on Jan 15, 2020

Must have command line tools!

#productivity #beginners #linux #macos

It's been a while since my last post, and I thought it would be a nice new year start sharing my favourite command-line tools.

Here we go:

bat, A cat(1) clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration.
ag, The silver searcher. A code-searching tool similar to ack, but faster. http://geoff.greer.fm/ag/
ripgrep, another alternative to ack and ag. (Thanks to Michael for reminding me of this great tool).
fd, A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to 'find'.
fzf, A command-line fuzzy finder.
forgit, Utility tool powered by fzf for using git interactively. Thanks to Mr F..
ranger, A VIM-inspired file manager for the console https://ranger.github.io
tig, Text-mode interface for git https://jonas.github.io/tig/
hub, A command-line tool that makes git easier to use with GitHub. https://hub.github.com/

$ hub clone rtomayko/tilt

# expands to:
#=> git clone git://github.com/rtomayko/tilt.git

httpie, Modern command line HTTP client – user-friendly curl alternative with intuitive UI, JSON support, syntax highlighting, wget-like downloads, extensions, etc. https://httpie.org/
jq, A lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor.
exa, A modern version of ‘ls’. https://the.exa.website/ (Thanks to Mr F.)

Michael Kohl Suggestions:

lab, like hub but for Gitlab (also wraps hub, so can manage both from one tool).
broot Instead of tree.
rq record query, like jq but supporting more data formats.

Top comments (21)

Christian Kreiling • Jan 14 '20

Most notable (and new) to me in your list are exa and bat, which are both much more modern and intuitive versions of the increasingly outdated ls and cat. exa's -T option is especially useful.

ag is also a personal favorite of mine, especially for finding TODOs in a codebase, since it ignores paths specified in the .gitignore file.

To anyone reading this: note that you can just alias those commands in your ~/.bash_profile to make the transition from ls, cat, and ack feel more seamless.

I've been using HTTPie for a long time now - I think it's a very intuitive and a useful tool for web developers who prefer to stay close to the command line. The most popular GUI alternative is Postman, however in some ways its UI is clunky and unjustified when you want to do some quick & simple API tinkering. If anyone knows of a more intuitive alternative to Postman, I'd love to know.

I'd argue that these tools are most notable since they seek to be more intuitive (and in some cases performant) alternatives to their increasingly outdated but most widely-used counterparts.

Heiker • Jan 15 '20

If you don't mind having Node.js installed, I created this script for myself to avoid using postman for simple tasks. It reads data from a json file and executes one or more requests. It also has a somewhat limited interactive mode so you can inspect/modify the request data before sending it.

Florian Rand • Jan 15 '20

I use a few nodejs clis, I'll save yours to try it later, but httpie has me really well-covered atm.

And by the way, Tiny Tina, is that a Borderlands reference? Pretty cool!

Heiker • Jan 15 '20

I hope you can find it useful.

It is a Borderlands reference. I was going to call it tinypost but I changed before uploading it to github.

Mr F. • Jan 14 '20

thank you for sharing, this is a great list. bat and httpie look great. I have been using exa as a replacement for ls. I wonder how it would compliment ranger.

Florian Rand • Jan 14 '20

Thank you! I didn't know exa, added to the list :) (I must admit I have some unhealthy attraction to command-line tools written in rust :)

Mr F. • Jan 15 '20 • Edited

I installed almost all of the tools you listed. As a result ended staying up all night searching for more!

I think forgit is a great extension to fzf

Florian Rand • Jan 15 '20

As a result ended staying up all night searching for more!

That happens to me more often than I'd admit with nvim 😂.

I think forgit is a great extension to fzf

Interesting! right now I use the git cli directly, I'm going check it out, thanks for sharing! Cheers :D

Mr F. • Jan 15 '20

I wrote a less thorough article similar to yours a few weeks back. Couple more things in there. My favourite is thefuck

David Wickes • Jan 14 '20

TBH the only useful tool in this lot is jq - it's useful for breaking down blobs of JSON in a shell pipeline. No other real alternative.

The rest of them are for developers who want the warm happy glow of working on the command line, but don't actually want to learn how to use it properly.

Florian Rand • Jan 14 '20 • Edited

Don't be a lemon David! You are half right. I've been using cli tools since 1995. Awk, sed, ack, find... Are you one of those Who dictate which is the proper way of using things? Because in my opinion tools are there to fix problems, not create new ones 😜

rhymes • Jan 19 '20

ripgrep makes a real difference, especially with a large codebase. I'm not surprised VSCode integrated it for its search. I can literally see the difference between grepping with ripgrep and grep on the DEV's codebase. BTW they kind have the same options so there's no re-learning there.

I've aliased exa to ls and forgotten about it.

I've ditched httpie because it's completely different from curl.

I use hub everyday because I review tons of PRs and it saves a lot of typing :D

I tried bat for a while months ago but it's not that useful so I ditched it.

The rest seem very specific, not particularly interesting :D