What's Your Most Underrated Developer Tool? I'll Start.

Mine is jq.

I use it every single day, and I'm constantly surprised how many developers don't know it exists.

# Pretty-print any JSON
curl -s https://api.github.com/users/torvalds | jq .

# Extract specific fields
cat data.json | jq '.users[] | {name, email}'

# Filter and transform
cat logs.json | jq '[.[] | select(.status >= 400)] | length'

Before jq, I was writing Python scripts to parse JSON. Now it's a one-liner.

My Other "Nobody Talks About This" Tools

httpie — Better curl

# Instead of:
curl -X POST https://api.example.com/data -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"key":"value"}'

# Just:
http POST api.example.com/data key=value

bat — Better cat

Syntax highlighting, line numbers, git integration. Just replace cat with bat and everything looks better.

fd — Better find

# Instead of:
find . -name "*.py" -type f

# Just:
fd -e py

ripgrep (rg) — Better grep

# 10x faster than grep, respects .gitignore by default
rg "TODO" --type py

fzf — Fuzzy finder for everything

# Search command history
ctrl+r  # (after installing fzf)

# Find and open a file
vim $(fzf)

# Kill a process interactively
kill -9 $(ps aux | fzf | awk '{print $2}')

direnv — Auto-load .envrc

Automatically loads/unloads environment variables when you cd into a directory. No more source .env or forgetting which project needs which vars.

lazygit — Terminal UI for git

If you hate memorizing git commands but also don't want a full GUI, lazygit is perfect. Interactive staging, rebasing, cherry-picking — all from the terminal.

The Criteria

What makes a tool "underrated"?

1. Saves >5 minutes per day — that's 30+ hours per year
2. Most developers don't know it — or they know it but haven't tried it
3. Works everywhere — Linux, Mac, WSL

Your Turn

What's the tool you can't live without that nobody talks about?

Drop it in the comments with a one-line description of what it does.

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I curate 200+ free developer tools and APIs. New tools added weekly.