Daily Archives: September 5, 2019

More of those CLI Utilities

I’ve found some more CLI utilities (via this thread) that look like they’re worth further investigation.

  • Zola, a static site generator
  • fd (a/k/a fd-find), an “80% replacement” for find; see also fselect
  • xsv, a tool for working with CSV files
  • broot, another disk analysis/tree replacement
  • sd, a sed replacement
  • cw, a wc replacement
  • hors, a combination of lynx and the technical web (which I couldn’t build on my Linux system because it’s running gcc instead of clang). (Ditto ‘bat’ btw.)
  • lolcate, a locate/updatedb replacement

I’m intrigued by topgrade but a little terrified of actually using it.

And I found the indispensable utility called genact.

Rust Command-Line Utilities

I’ve been learning (or maybe beginning to learn) the Rust programming language. (It was a toss-up between that and Go, and I probably picked wrong, but I won’t know until I know a lot more than I do now.)

  • Tokei (for counting source code lines) and
  • diffr as an alternative to colordiff
  • ripgrep as an alternative to ack (etc.)
  • just as a command runner (think “make”)
  • lsd and exa as replacements for ls
  • pastel for working with colors on the command line
  • skim (not to be confused with the excellent Skim) as a fuzzy finder
  • dust, dutree, and dua-cli as replacements for du
  • bat (“better cat”) and mdcat (cat for markdown)
  • starship (prompt)

I’m only beginning to play with these. But I was surprised to see so much activity developing command line utilities. There is some misunderstanding of the Unix philosophy, but it’s understandable (cat isn’t for viewing files, but of course that’s how most of us use it). Yay open source!