Command-line utilities

2024-02-20

Here's a rewrite of an older post thanks to the awesome list on github. To complement this list, here's a curated version of productivity tools I use daily.

The tools I cannot live without:

Shell: fish is nice but if you want to lose POSIX compatibility, you should go all the way and embrace a new workflow. I use nu shell as a daily driver: it considers all data as table, allowing for powerful manipulation.
Move around quickly with zoxide. It allows you to jump quickly to a directory with z boo (instead of cd /home/user/misc/books). A must have
A better sudo: use doas (from OpenBSD). The configuration is super easy, just write /usr/local/etc/doas.conf (on FreeBSD) :
```
# Permit members of the wheel group to perform actions as root. 
permit nopass :wheel
```
Manage tasks with taskwarrior. More on that in a future post.
Write papers and report with typst. More on that in a future post.
ripgrep is a modern grep but cross-platform and faster

Interesting tools you should try. Some of them are popular tools rewritten in rust

Terminal : I use alacritty along with zellij (see below). kitty is a nice alternative if you don't need a multiplexer
Zellij is a rewrite in rust of tmux. 2 things that I really like : shortcuts are saner and you can open an editor to copy history (C-s then e)
lazygit makes working with command-line git easier. It is similar to magit in emacs, with less features but good enough for my use case
A easier find with fd written in Rust. For example, convert all org files to markdown with

       fd -e md -x pandoc {} -o {.}.md`

An easier sed with sd. Example: replace title: by title = :

sd 'title:' 'title = '

Replacement for ls wit eza (Rust)
Replacement for cat wit bat (Rust)

Tools for the occasional use

For reference: other tools written in Rust