A list of new(ish) command line tools

• https://jvns.ca/blog/2022/04/12/a-list-of-new-ish--command-line-tools/
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31009313

Hello! Today I asked on twitter about newer command line tools, like ripgrep and fd and fzf and exa and bat.

I got a bunch of replies with tools I hadn’t heard of, so I thought I’d make a list here. A lot of people also pointed at the modern-unix list.

replacements for standard tools

• ripgrep, ag, ack (grep)
• exa, lsd (ls)
• mosh (ssh)
• bat (cat)
• delta (a pager for git)
• fd (find)
• drill, dog (dig)
• duf (df)
• dust, ncdu (du)
• pgcli (psql)
• btm, btop, glances, gtop, zenith (top)
• tldr (man, sort of)
• sd (sed)
• difftastic (diff)
• mtr (traceroute)
• plocate (locate)
• xxd, hexyl (hexdump)

new inventions

Here are some tools that are not exactly replacements for standard tools:

• z, fasd, autojump, zoxide (tools to make it easier to find files / change directories)
• broot, nnn, ranger (file manager)
• direnv (load environment variables depending on the current directory)
• fzf, peco (“fuzzy finder”)
• croc and magic-wormhole (send files from one computer to another)
• hyperfine (benchmarking)
• httpie, curlie, xh (for making HTTP requests)
• entr (run arbitrary commands when files change)
• asdf (version manager for multiple languages)
• tig, lazygit (interactive interfaces for git)
• lazydocker (interactive interface for docker)
• choose (the basics of awk/cut)
• ctop (top for containers)
• fuck (autocorrect command line errors)
• tmate (share your terminal with a friend)
• lnav, angle-grinder (tools for managing logs)
• mdp, glow (ways to display markdown in the terminal)
• pbcopy/pbpaste (for clipboard <> stdin/stdout) maybe aren’t “new” but were mentioned a lot. You can use xclip to do the same thing on Linux.

JSON/YAML/CSV things:

• jq (a great JSON-wrangling tool)
  • https://github.com/stedolan/jq
  • https://earthly.dev/blog/jq-select/
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31166956
  • X https://github.com/itchyny/gojq
    • "gojq does not keep the order of object keys" is a bit disappointing.
• jc (convert various tools’ output into JSON)
• jo (create JSON objects)
• yq (like jq, but for YAML). there’s also another yq
• fq (like jq, but for binary)
• htmlq (like jq, but for HTML)
• fx (interactive json tool)
• jless (json pager)
• xsv (a command line tool for csv files, from burntsushi)
• visidata (“an interactive multitool for tabular data”)
• miller (“like awk/sed/cut/join/sort for CSV/TSV/JSON/JSON lines”)

grep things:

• pdfgrep (grep for PDF)
• gron (make JSON greppable)
• ripgrep-all (ripgrep, but also PDF, zip, ebooks, etc)

less-new tools

Here are a few of not-so-new tools folks mentioned aren’t that well known:

• pv (“pipe viewer”, gives you a progress bar for a pipe)
• vidir (from moreutils, lets you batch rename/delete files in vim)
• sponge, ts, parallel (also from moreutils)

some of my favourites

My favourites of these that I use already are entr, ripgrep, git-delta, httpie, plocate, and jq.

I’m interested in trying out direnv, btm, z, xsv, and duf, but I think the most exciting tool I learned about is vidir.