15 Command Line Tools which Spark Joy in Your Terminal

TUI file managers such as nnn (github.com/jarun/nnn, minimalistic, my favourite) or lf (github.com/gokcehan/lf/, a more interactive one)

delta, more limited than lazygit, focused on just diffs, but it does it really really well, and can be a nice complement (github.com/dandavison/delta)

glow terminal markdown renderer (github.com/charmbracelet/glow): some might think this is superfluous, because markdown is supposed to be meaningfully readable as plain text, but I often find poorly formatted files, sometimes "augmented" with a lot of inline HTML, to the point of becoming impossible to parse for the human eye

Speaking of creating your own cli tools. I would like to share something cool: a scripting language called ABS.

This is why I think is cool.

• It has a C-like syntax.
• You can call external commands and handle the result in a convenient way.
• It has a module system.
• It has a builtin tool that allows you to create cli tools.

Here is a little snippet.

tz = `cat /etc/timezone`

if !tz.ok {
  echo("Ooops, something went wrong")
  exit(1)
}

continent, city = tz.split("/")

echo("Best city in the world?")

selection = stdin()

if selection == city {
  echo("You might be biased...")
} else {
  echo("Yes, ${selection} is awesome.")
}

I wrote about this language a few years ago, here is the post if anyone is interested.

I like this a lot because it allows people who are familiar with a languages like javascript or PHP (that would be me) to write shell scripts in a way that feels comfortable.

If bat looks appealing to you and you happen to be a Vim user, you might want to consider running view /path/to/file instead of bat. It'll open any file as readonly in Vim, with all your favorite plugins like Git integration present. Instead of piping to | less, you could also pipe to | view -. You may have to enter something like :set syntax=json if the syntax isn't autodetected based on content, although there's probably a simple setting or plugin to enable autodetection.

If you're not a Vim user and you want something that works with zero configuration, bat seems like a good choice!

jump (github.com/gsamokovarov/jump) is in my opinion a better alternative to autojump

I personally prefer jump because it's actively maintained, but especially because – like all modern tools listed here – it's a standalone executable that does not require Python

it works really well, the author says it can "read his mind" and I tend to agree 🙂

I’m using ripgrep and bat daily, and they make everything just that much better.

Another tool I’m using a lot is Just. I might have processes which need a number of steps, or building a project with a lot of arguments. I can abstract it all away and use something like “just build” instead.

github.com/casey/just

Hey! I made this CLI tool called fcd which replaces the cd command. It basically searches for wherever you are trying to cd and then copies the appropriate cd command to your clipboard.

If you want exa to behave just like ls, so that you do not need to learn any new switches, I have made this wrapper script:
gist.github.com/eggbean/74db77c4f6...

I've found lazygit to be quite handy, myself.

github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit

Z is similar to autojump & works great for me.