Command Line Tools I Like (2022)

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2024-10-09 19:30:03

This is another fairly technical post, and in particular presupposes some enthusiasm for the command line. If that isn’t you, feel free to skip this one!

Despite being primarily an iOS developer, I use the command line quite a bit - I guess old habits from my time as an embedded software intern die hard. That said, I like a number of modern command line tools, many written in Rust, which are typically blazing fast and have better command-line interfaces than traditional Unix tools.

I have a noted love for vim, but when I’m not using an IDE with a vim mode, I’m actually typically using neovim, alias nvim, which is a modern reimplementation of vim with much less technical debt, a scripting engine based on Lua instead of notoriously-idiosyncratic vimscript, and reasonable defaults like syntax highlighting enabled by default. It also has a full implementation of the Language Server Protocol, which enables it to have very rich, Visual Studio Code-esque plugins.

fzf is a command-line fuzzy finder; given some input, fzf lets you search through the input with a fuzzy matching search term. One use I find for this is my custom git alias for a fancy branch switcher, git b, which lets me fuzzy-search for branch names when I want to switch branches.