Favorite CLI Tools

Almost each of the non-macOS tools was once used daily by me, but I've since switched to even better ones in some/all use-cases.

zsh + zinit [0] + powerlevel10k [1] > fish + starship. Powerlevel10k and zinit make prompt initialization time with all my plugins much lower than the equivalent setup in fish; I can start typing as soon as I open a terminal without breaking up my prompt.

gotop/ytop complement glances/htop. They offer a really sleek TUI that uses braille characters to draw graphs.

Poetry > Virtualenv for working in venvs in Python projects.

Distro packages > pyenv, rbenv, nodeenv. Most distros provide packages for multiple interpreter versions, and only use one by default. For example, Fedora uses symlinks: /bin/python -> /bin/python3 -> /bin/python3.8; I also have python3.9 beta, python3.7, and python3.6 installed for testing.

For some usecases, termtosvg can be better than asciinema. termtosvg doesn't require additional software or javascript if the user already has a web browser or other animated SVG viewer.

delta [2] > diff-so-fancy and colordiff. Delta combines language-specific syntax highlighting (foreground) with diff highlighting (background).

nnn [3] > ncdu. It has the functionality of ncdu when sorting by disk usage on top of being the best file manager I've ever used.

[0]: https://github.com/zdharma/zinit

[1]: https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k

[2]: https://github.com/dandavison/delta

[3]: https://github.com/jarun/nnn

Looks like a great list. Installed a lot of them seamlessly through Arch. Now the hard part will be remembering they exist :-)

fzf has been a gamechanger for me. it can do a whole lot more than what comes out of the box with some light scripting too - e.g something like this [1] can search apt, show a description of the selected package on the side, and select multiple packages to install in one command.

[1] https://github.com/krickelkrakel/fzf-apt/blob/master/fzf-apt

Missing from the list: vifm

It's the best file manager I've used. It gives you 2 default panes in the terminal, and you can use vi-like commands to operate on one or multiple files. Especially good for operating on multiple files - for example, if you want to rename multiple files, you select the files, and edit the filenames in vi.