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Comment by planetafro | Hacker News Reader

Oddly, I'm the opposite. Working in devops and vscode, I find the visual aspect of color and logical formatting improves my work dramatically. Small tools like "bat" vs. "cat" on the terminal are great at quick data parsing for things like yaml, json, and the like. Staying old school for the sake of old school is a bit of a fallacy IMHO.

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I understand you but bat, exa, etc.. have a huge downside. I have to change many platforms and systems at work and I can't be bothered to install all those new utilities in every new system.

cat, ls, etc.. just work, bat has to be installed, and I have a pretty high threshold for a utility to be so vital for me that I absolutely have to install it in every Unix box I work.

I started to keep an Ansible playbook to setup everything for me. Basically, it replaces most of the core utils with modern alternatives like like cat -> bat, grep -> ripgrep, top -> htop, and so on.

That way, I don't have manually install everything for new systems or when I'm doing a clean install on one of my existing systems.

You might enjoy looking into nix and nixos. It’s designed to make that workflow as bulletproof as possible. One of my coworkers maintains a github repo that describes his exact system, and can create a sandbox that behaves the exact same as the one he’s used to with one command (on any machine that has nix installed).

The problem isn't getting these tools on our own systems. The problem is getting these tools onto every box that might have to SSH into sometime.

Github link?

I haven't thought about making it public because it's just a matter of using the get_url command to download the binaries into /usr/bin and then outputting a .bashrc and /etc/bash.bashrc that contains aliases for every command like "alias cat=bat".

bat especially was a revelation. I don't think I'll ever use cat again if I can help it. I recently found exa[1] which was a bit too colorful for my taste but very nice too

[1] https://github.com/ogham/exa

Have you tried LSDeluxe?

https://github.com/Peltoche/lsd

LSD has always been a favorite for those who like to watch the pretty colours go by.

> I don't think I'll ever use cat again if I can help it.

I just tested simple concatenation and bat is over 10x slower:

  $ time cat 1GiB 1GiB 1GiB 1GiB >/dev/null
  real 0m0.414s
  user 0m0.014s
  sys 0m0.400s
  $ time bat 1GiB 1GiB 1GiB 1GiB >/dev/null
  real 0m4.257s
  user 0m1.659s
  sys 0m2.594s

Seems like a lot of these "modern" replacements lose what the original simpler utils do well.

I don't use bat as a replacement for cat, but as a replacement for less. Sure, bat can concatenate a file, but I'd say that's not the main use. The syntax coloring of file contents is my favorite use case. Line numbers and some of the other options are useful at times too. Also, I don't think I've ever needed to concatenate multiple gigabyte sized files (yes, I am sure it exists for a lot of people, but would say it's not as common as looking at a file).

> I just tested simple concatenation and bat is over 10x slower

Seems like a recurring thing[0] with the modern alternatives.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29616727

I'm the same way. Why waste time reading when syntax highlighting draws your eyes to important info? Also, iTerm2 with triggers or whatever they are called? Magnifique.

I have limited focus as is, if I can make mental search easier, it takes a noticeable cognitive load off.

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