An Illustrated Guide to Useful Command Line Tools

Inspired by a similar post by Ben Boyter this a list of useful command line tools that I use. It’s not a list of every tool I use. These are tools that are new or typically not part of a standard POSIX command line environment.

This post is a living document and will be updated over time. It should be obvious that I have a strong preference for fast tools without a large runtime dependency like Python or node.js. Most of these tools are portable to *BSD, Linux, macOS. Many also work on Windows. For OSes that ship up to date software many are available via the system package repository.

About my CLI environment:I use the zsh shell, Pragmata Pro font, and base16 default dark color scheme. My prompt is generated by promptline .

Table of Contents

Alacritty

Alacritty is fast terminal emulator. Whilst not strictly a command line tool, it does host everything I do in the command line. It is the terminal emulator in use in all the screenshots on this page.

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alt

alt is a tool for finding the alternate to a file. E.g. the header for an implementation or the test for an implementation. I use it paired with Neovim to easily toggle between tests and implementation.

$ alt app/models/page.rb
spec/models/page_spec.rb

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bat

bat is an alternative to the common (mis)use of cat to print a file to the terminal. It supports syntax highlighting and git integration.

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chars

chars shows information about Unicode characters matching a search term.

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dot

dot is a dotfiles manager. It maintains a set of symlinks according to a mappings file. I use it to manage my dotfiles .

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dust

dust is an alternative du -sh . It calculates the size of a directory tree, printing a summary of the largest items.

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exa

exa is a replacement for ls with sensible defaults and added features like a tree view, git integration, and optional icons. I have ls aliased to exa in my shell.

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eva

eva is a command line calculator similar to bc , with syntax highlighting and persistent history.

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fd

fd is an alternative to find and has a more user friendly command line interface and respects ignore files, like .gitignore . The combination of its speed and ignore file support make it excellent for searching for files in git repositories.

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hexyl

hexyl is a hex viewer that uses Unicode characters and colour to make the output more readable.

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jq

jq is kind of like awk for JSON. It lets you transform and extract information from JSON documents.

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mdcat

mdcat renders Markdown files in the terminal. In supported terminals (not Alacritty) links are clickable (without the url being visible like in a web browser) and images are rendered.

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pass

pass is a password manager that uses GPG to store the passwords. I use it with the passff Firefox extension and Pass for iOS on my phone.

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Podman

podman is an alternative to Docker that does not require a daemon. Containers are run as the user running Podman so files written into the host don’t end up owned by root. The CLI is largely compatible with the docker CLI.

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Restic

restic is a backup tool that performs client side encryption, de-duplication and supports a variety of local and remote storage backends.

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ripgrep

ripgrep ( rg ) recursively searches file trees for content in files matching a regular expression. It’s extremely fast, and respects ignore files and binary files by default.

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shotgun

shotgun is a tool for taking screenshots on X.org based environments. All the screenshots in this post were taken with it. It pairs well with slop .

$ shotgun $(slop -c 0,0,0,0.75 -l -f "-i %i -g %g") eva.png

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skim

skim is a fuzzy finder. It can be used to fuzzy match input fed to it. I use it with Neovim and zsh for fuzzy matching file names.

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slop

slop (Select Operation) presents a UI to select a region of the screen or a window and prints the region to stdout. Works well with shotgun .

$ slop -c 0,0,0,0.75 -l -f "-i %i -g %g"
-i 8389044 -g 1464x1008+291+818

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Syncthing

Syncthing is a decentralised file synchronisation tool. Like Dropbox but self hosted and without the need for a central third-party file store.

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tig

tig is a ncurses TUI for git. It’s great for reviewing and staging changes, viewing history and diffs.

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titlecase

titlecase is a little tool I wrote to format text using a title case format described by John Gruber . It correctly handles puctuation, and words like iPhone. I use it to obtain consistent titles on all my blog posts.

$ echo 'an illustrated guide to useful command line tools' | titlecase
An Illustrated Guide to Useful Command Line Tools

I typically use it from within Neovim where selected text is piped through it in-place. This is done by creating a visual selection and then typing: :!titlecase .

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Universal Ctags

Universal Ctags is a fork of exuberant ctags that is actively maintained. ctags is used to generate a tags file that vim and other tools can use to navigate to the definition of symbols in files.

$ ctags --recurse src

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watchexec

watchexec is a file a directory watcher that can run commands in response to file system changes. Handy for auto running tests or restarting a development web server when source files change.

# run command on file change
$ watchexec -w content cobalt build

# kill and restart server on file change
$ watchexec -w src -s SIGINT -r 'cargo run'

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z

z tracks your most used directories and allows you to jump to them with a partial name.

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zola

zola is a full-featured very fast static site compiler.

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