Discussion on: Essential terminal packages in 2020

[Ben Sinclair]

This is always going to be opinionated, especially when people use words like, "essential"...

I use zsh on Macs, but only because of Apple's bundling it to get around the GPL on bash. I think oh-my-zsh is a waste of time, because I haven't found any features in it that I want and that I can't do, easily, without it. As far as I'm concerned, it's bloat.

fzf is great. I'm not sure it's essential but I do use it a lot, wrapped in something so it's not a hard dependency:

if command -v fzf >/dev/null; then
  # progressive enhancement here
fi

ripgrep is great. I've used ack and the-silver-searcher too, and they're all good, but rg is the winner as far as I'm concerned. It's worth it to learn grep though :)

I'm sure autojump is cool, and I know people use some things that are similar, like z or the old CDPATH, but they're not how my brain works and I don't like using them.

httpie looks alright, maybe the curl version of the grep -> ripgrep progressive enhancement. I don't use it, personally, but I can see the appeal.

I use bat quite a lot, but I have a problem with it being used as a drop-in replacement for cat. It's more a drop-in replacement for less -F, otherwise it's one of them Useless Uses of Cat, but with wings.

exa doesn't offer me more than ls except maybe for colourising the file permissions. I don't need another full program for that!

twf looks cool. I'll check it out, because I make my own mashups of commands with fzf quite frequently.

[James G. Best]

Thanks for your feedback. Maybe Essential is loaded. They are essential to me as they are part of my everyday toolkit.