A presentation at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage by Alexander Reelsen
Modern CLI tools Alexander Reelsen alex@elastic.co | @spinscale
Today’s goal Learn CLI tools you have not heard about. Increase your productivity
Don’t spew on UIs UIs solve different issues ⏯ UIs help to reduce complexity UIs will help newcomers UIs look nicer GOAT: The web!
Why CLI tools then? Scripting Speed Flexibility Automation
Why CLI tools then? 🛠 Process safety Expert mode Issue: Outdated distribution packages Do one thing and do it well!
Modern CLI tools? Many tools still stem from the early UNIX times Rise of the developer UTF8 Colors 🏎 Faster terminals Debugging (ephemeral containers, no local logs, remote)
New languages Rust Go Crystal JVM: GraalVM, Kotlin Native, Scala Native Zig V
New languages Binary as a result, best startup time No C/memory management learning required Faster development
Shell - zsh in combination with oh-my-zsh scripting syntax similar to bash lots of plugins for easier development
Shell - alternatives bash fish nushell
Shell Prompt - GBT
Shell Prompt - GBT
Shell Prompt - Starship
Shell aliases Make sure you alias what you type often! .. ll
wd
Shell history search Ctrl+R triggers history search Extremely powerful Ensure your history gets written after command execution instead of logout
lsd
lsd a better ls colored output relative/absolute timestamps file type icons (nerdfonts) tree view total directory size view
bat
bat cat with wings Syntax highlighting & themes Line highlighting Range snippets (no more cat | head | tail parties) git integration builtin pagination
fd
fd a better find, very similar syntax colors! takes .gitignore into account case-insensitive by default regexes parallel command execution (when used with -x )
ripgrep
ripgrep It’s fast! match patterns across newlines takes .gitignore into account skips dot files and binary files recursive && regexing by default replacement of matched text ripgrep-all to search in binary files
htop
prettyping
hyperfine
JSON coloring
JSON selection
JSON selection
fzf curl -s ‘localhost:9200/_cat/indices?format=json’ \ | jq -C -r \ ‘[ .[] | select ( .index | startswith(“.”) | not) ] | sort_by(.index) | .[].index’ \ | fzf
curl -s ‘localhost:9200/_cat/indices?format=json’ \ | jq -C -r \ ‘[ .[] | select ( .index | startswith(“.”) | not) ] | sort_by(.index) | .[].index’ \ | fzf
bandwhich
ytop
procs
dust
version managers JVM: sdkman nodejs: nvm ruby: rvm Problem: per project requirements
direnv - unclutter your profile .envrc layout node export NODE_VERSIONS=~/.nvm/versions/node export NODE_VERSION_PREFIX=’v’ use node 15.11.0 dotenv
direnv - unclutter your profile .env DB_USERNAME=”sa” DB_PASSWORD=”” DB_URL=”jdbc:h2:mem:foo_in_memory;MODE=PostgreSQL;DB_CLOSE_DELAY=-1;DATABASE_TO_UPPER=false” Run direnv allow after a change
envchain - store secrets securely envchain —set my_app DB_PASSWORD envchain ./gradlew run
Better diffs
colordiff
icdiff
scc - source code analyzer
Honorable mentions GPU based terminal emulators: alacritty & kitty exiftool, remove exif data exiftool -all= my.png tmux - next session will be all about tmux! sd, a faster sed alternative zoxide, a new cd that remembers your most common paths
Honorable mentions rlwrap, a readline wrapper cli, the github cli tool taskwarrior, the CLI todo management tool
Missing Note taking tool, that automatically syncs in the cloud/via git Time tracking? What are your favourite tools? Feel free to ping (twitter, email, linkedin, whatever)
Write CLI tools Command Line Interface Guidelines
Resources direnv envchain fish shell Starship fd bat hyperfine
Resources ripgrep ripgrep-all Grep tools feature comparison Rewritten in Rust: Modern Alternatives of Command-Line Tools Command Line Interface Guidelines A better zsh history
Thanks for listening Q&A Alexander Reelsen alex@elastic.co | @spinscale
Many of the CLI tools that we use daily are already a couple of decades old - and seem not to be modernized too much - or do they? Is there a cat variant with syntax highlighting? Or a find implementation that takes .gitignore into account? Is grep really the best tool to search in files? This talk shows a couple of interesting alternatives to existing CLI tools.
for free. You
can too.