Hacker News Reader

Comment by thinkingkong | Hacker News Reader

I think productive programmers would get way further by learning powerful scripting and one liners than picking different pre existing binaries. Its a little oldschool but pipe is the most powerful concept on the command line and it’s wildly productive

View on HN

Though I agree that new is not necessarily better, and programmers should absolutely try to stratch their own itch with the existing tools (bash, sed, awk and the likes), some new tools are a great improvement and should be granted as such when due.

FZF, for instance, is a major novelty in terms of interface, and it really follows the UNIX philosophy and shows immense composability.

FZF has indeed been a life changer for me: I loved ctrl+r, but fzf enhances it so much, and without much extra/non-desired functions.

I think fzf is still a useful recommendation (better fuzzy matching for Ctrl-R). Or just Ctrl-R for reverse search in bash/zsh is a good thing to know.

Yes, I've found that the most significant improvements for me came with bash aliases, a few little scripts, and nnn for anything that has to do with folder navigation or file browsing. Its search-based navigation speed is unmatched.

Another big upgrade was dmenu. Just slap it in some bash script and now it's interactive. Combined with xbindkeys you can even bind those menus to keys, and it'll work on any Xorg-based desktop.

Pipe is not old-school. Yea, 20+ years ago I learned that feature - and its much older. But! Daily since then I pipe to grep, sed, awk, cut and occasionally perl, php, ruby or now we have JavaScript CLI tools, wow!

Pipe is the new-cool! (always_was.jpg)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com