New alternatives to well known unix/linux terminal commands

Tools
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We all work in cmdline quite a bit and its always fun to find new alternatives, here an article discussing few of them, I already use htop regularly, what all tools are you using out of these?

  • bat – alternative to cat
  • ncdu – alternative to du
  • dua – alternative to du/ncdu
  • fd – alternative to find
  • exa – alternative to ls
  • tldr – alternative to man
  • dust – A more intuitive version of du in rust
  • btop – Resource monitor that shows usage and stats for processor, memory, disks, network and processes.
  • rg – ripgrep, grep alternative
  • yazi – terminal file manager TUI
  • lazygit – Git TUI
  • helix – Like Vim, but better.

(this first post is a wiki, that we’ll try to keep it updated as a comprehensive reference)

1 Like
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most of those are new to me – will check them out!

I’ll add another to the list:

(written in Rust)

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I’m liking the fd command a lot.

(written in Rust)

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Viddy – Modern watch command.

(written in Go)

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tere - a faster alternative to cd + ls.

(written in Rust)

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Another grep alternative, benchmarks seems to show that its fastest of all.

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Thanks @khem – I was playing with ug -Q (interactive TUI) – that is really cool. Will definitely keep this in my toolkit. I currently mostly use ripgrep.

While playing in the TUI, I did manage to get it to crash:

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This is not surprising being a fairly young C++ program, but it does illustrate this is C++ … there is a tradeoff between speed (C/C++) and stability (Rust/Go) and a place for both.

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yeah I use ripgrep too. This came to be even faster but I guess without handrails :slight_smile:

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I have also started using couple of more tools

zoxide - A modern alternative for cd
eza - An alternative for ls

here is a good list of aliases to create - eza-ls · GitHub

here is what it will look like :slight_smile:

Screenshot 2024-10-16 at 10.40.57 AM
Screenshot 2024-10-16 at 10.40.57 AM3310×262 92.7 KB

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glances is a system monitor written in python. It gives a screenful of useful information. Came in handy when I was diagnosing my CPU heatsink failure.

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How I use fd to quickly find and open files

The fd command is great – defaults are really good. But one thing that is really handy is find files, then open these files in your editor:

[cbrake@ceres ~]$ cd /scratch4/yoe/yoe-distro/sources/
[cbrake@ceres sources]$ fd agx
meta-tegra/conf/machine/jetson-agx-orin-devkit-industrial.conf
meta-tegra/conf/machine/include/agx-orin.inc
meta-tegra/conf/machine/jetson-agx-orin-devkit.conf
[cbrake@ceres sources]$ fd agx -X helix

Now helix (or whatever editor you want to use) is opened with these files:

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dua-cli

Written in rust, aggressively parallel, generally considered faster then ncdu.

Install on Arch: pacman -S dua-cli