My Arsenal of CLI Tools

abhijithota.me

4 points·kretaceous··2 comments

One thing I've noticed about lists like these is that the tools are mostly flashy and feature-packed, almost invariably with colorized output, sometimes with funky Unicode symbols like check marks, and usually written in a fashionable language like Rust or Go.

Some of them, I've found, don't work too well on the Linux framebuffer console, which is where I spend most of my time. They seem to be designed with 256-color terminals in mind.

I get the appeal, but small and simple stuff written in C, with very few dependencies, is more to my taste. I'm wondering if there are many others who feel similarly.

Thinking of moreutils[1] as a classic example that solves problems not easily solved by the standard POSIX tools, but in a very straightforward and non-flashy way.

[1] https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

I opt for colors and "flashiness" whenever there is some output to the terminal which is to be seen by me. That makes it easier to read for me. Of course, this is subjective. Most of these tools disable color output when piped (batcat, etc) which makes it easier to awk/sed them or have an options to turn of colors. Some of these tools are not meant to be piped (nnn).

For tools which require no output (autojumpers, entr, etc.), I prefer lightweight bash scripts or C programs.

Thanks for a reminder of moreutils! I'll definitely have to try vipe as that seems to fit some of my needs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com