just 2 in the list were GPL licensed :/
Exa dev couldn’t even spell license right…
licence is a word, commonly used in commonwealth countries.
english english is wrong. american english is good. jeff foxworthy told me in a dream.
Great list, but a couple could be added:
- btop (process/resouces monitor, highly customizable)
- lnav (log navigator, grouping folder of files in one display, search/filter etc…)
Btop++ is general better since it’s written in c++ and is faster
Here’s a slightly better list. Call out to nushell and fish, my two modern shell favourites.
Sometimes I do some one liners when in a shell, and neither of these are POSIX compliant. That’s why I just stick to my customised zsh that basically does the same as fish.
You’re absolutely right. Fish isn’t really for scripting but is great for purely interactive use.
Nushell however offers a totally different approach to “scripting” and I can achieve far more in a nushell one-liner than I ever could in a POSIX shell as it’s far more comparable to Python Pandas than a shell.
For instance I can plot a line chart of file modifications over time directly in the shell with a single line of nushell. It’s mind blowing.
That’s great. I’m glad you like it and it sounds pretty awesome. It adds more variety to the command line, which is a beautiful thing. However, I do too much with remote systems that I don’t “own”, however, so, POSIX, for me, is a hard requirement - adding another domain specific language that I can only sometimes use is not worth the cognitive load for me.
That’s totally understandable. And I’ll admit, I’m still writing a fair few #!/bin/sh headed scripts as I to work on too POSIX systems. I think we’re a long long way off of the POSIX standard being superseded by something else.
Fish is overrated imo.
Nushell is better but not quite what I’m looking for.Fish is no longer overrated.
Here’s a more exhaustive list: https://github.com/TaKO8Ki/awesome-alternatives-in-rust
Are these built to handle pipes? If I bat a file and redirect it to a file, does it work as expected or does it add in the escape sequences for the colors, for example?
bat foo | barbehaves likecat foo | barsame withand such.
“bat” seemed interesting, until I remembered that I’d just do a “git diff” if I wanted to see a diff. The rest do not strike me as substantially better than what they’re trying to replace. Enjoy them all as you will, but I would recommend refraining from describing them as “modern unix” in the presence of any old-timers.
Quite a few are just better, and others have the chance to get better because they’re actively accepting new features contributions.
One I personally use:
- delta Provides a better diff for code than git’s diff tool (even after trying all of git’s diff algorithms)
- ripgrep So much faster than grep. Also had great include/exclude file filtering, easier to use than grep’s
- jq Easy to exact json info. I tend to use rq too for yaml
- instead of mcfly I use atuin, which is another alternative bash history. I really didn’t think I’d like it, but it’s been a big productivity boon
- curlie/httpie A really nice alternative to something like postman when debugging HTTP connections. I use httpie rn but might switch because I’m so much more familiar with curl’s flags, but like the formatted output. There’s a few others I use that aren’t on the list too.
It’s totally fine to not want to change what’s working for you, but if you do that too long you could miss out on something that just works better in your workflow. Give em a go and complain after you switch back.
I love jq, but the rest doesn’t appeal too much to me – I’ve been in the game for so long, so I already memorize most useful flows in the normal corelibs. And because I won’t always have the alternative to install different stuff, I try to not depend on lots of non-standard software. But I’m glad you like it, FOSS is awesome.
This used to be exactly what I said too, I still run bash as my terminal so when I remote it works the same way. I’m the girl everyone asks when they need a one liner, I read through the sed/awk man pages for fun, and I can skim a script and tell if it’s posix compliant. But I finally realized I already know that stuff. When I’m developing locally I should be as productive as possible. When I’m running stuff remotely I can worry about whether the environment is gnu, bsd, or busybox.
Bat also adds lots of stuff to the output. Is there a clean print functionality without the extra numbers?
Edit: but with the parameters its great!
These programs are actually really cool and I un-ironically want to use them.
Oh
brootis really cool. Better thanexa --tree, because it has that sweet “xxx hidden” thing. This command makes it pretty close totree, as it prints it out rather than present you with an interactive screen, which I’m not interested at:broot --sort-by-type-dirs-first --cmd :print_treeMost of that stuff is MIT/Apache licensed unlike programs from GNU. Interesting.
It would be cool if the GNU project sponsored a new updated ‘standard’ set of tools though.
Why would they? The “old” tools work very well, are well known and are likely used in millions of scripts.
The new tools will have more bugs, unfamiliar options and unexpected behavior (due to them being new), and the improvements current “modern” alternatives bring to the table are often very minor.
I’d expect they’d ‘adopt’ the tools and redistribute them under the GPL, if they did.
