Introduction

If you work in a UNIX terminal on a daily basis, there are tools you need to master. These include: grep, find, a text editor such as Vim or Emacs, etc.

During the last couple of years, some incredibly cool open-source projects have brought us some new CLI tools to work in a faster and simpler way. This post tries to list those I use the most in my day-to-day life.

Tools

• bat, a replacement of cat bringing many useful features (e.g. syntax highlighting, Git integration)
• chezmoi, a simple tool to manage your dotfiles across multiple machines
• dive, a tool for exploring Docker image layers and contents
• fd, a faster and more user-friendly alternative to find
• eza, a modern replacement for ls
• just, a command runner that brings many improvements over Make¹
• jq, a command-line JSON processor (think awk but for JSON)
• neovim, a Vim-fork designed to be highly extensible, NvChad offers a solid default configuration
• ripgrep, a line search tool like grep, but faster and more user-friendly
• starship, a tool to customize your prompt in a simple way using TOML
• tmux, a powerful terminal multiplexer, I personally find it more user-friendly than screen