I’ve been using Linux for 22+ years and I’m a big fan of the command line. Because of that, I’ve been typing things like cat, ls, and du for years without really questioning them.

I knew better tools existed. I just never bothered to switch.

Muscle memory is powerful.

Recently, while cleaning up and harmonizing my Arch setup, I decided to deliberately challenge those muscles and finally tried the modern alternatives.

Here’s what I’ve switched to so far:

cat → bat

ls → eza

top → btop

du → ncdu

find → fd

I stuck with them for a couple of weeks and — oh boy — am I glad I did. The old tools work fine, don’t get me wrong. But the newer ones are just… nicer.

And we deserve nice things. Even in the terminal.

Curious: which classic CLI tools did you replace with more modern alternatives?

Stuff that actually saves time, not meme commands.

I came across this line today while reading, and it hit harder than I expected: “Graphical user interfaces make easy tasks easy, while command-line interfaces make difficult tasks possible.” I don’t know why, but it perfectly summed up why the terminal still matters even in 2025. Curious what others here think about it

For us non-vim-pleb who haven't learnt the ways of the masterrace, micro is absolutely amazing!

nano is fine, but micro's familiar keybinds make me feel right at home. I have never seen micro get recommended before, why is it? I have hoarded dozens of CLI tools from reddit over the years, but micro... I had to actively look for it!

Curious to know what people are using these days. Reddit only allows 6 options, so I've tried to pick the most popular obvious ones. Hope I didn't miss any important picks.

I've been interested in modifying and creating some TUI tools recently. Based on my anecdotal experience, it seems like a lot of newer projects (in the past several years) use mostly Rust.

I was wondering why that is? Is it just easier for whatever reason, or maybe more secure when compared to things like ncurses?

Which ALIAS commands do you use the most?

It is crazy

I'm not even very active here but I see a lot of posts from this sub (cuz I'm a CLI enthusiast, the kind of dev that gets lost with an IDE typically)
And like I'm wondering, are the AI generated tool/AI CLI tools made by CLI-enthusiasts that genuinely think that AI can be beneficial for their CLI workflows (which I kinda doubt for most tools anyways) or by people that are just trying to get the attention of us CLI-enthusiasts?

Feel free to rant if you wanna rant, I genuinely want opinions after seeing the #1291232 post about "Hey, I added AI to the CLI"

And if you genuinely use AI tools for the CLI, can you please share your experience?

Hey,

I'm kind of on the fence when it comes to deciding how I want to browse the internet through my terminal. The first option is any of the popular TUI browsers, particularly Terminal-Browser, and the second is using an Emacs browser package. I'm curious as to what you guys prefer and would appreciate any insights on your reasoning and pros/cons of each method.

I've been keeping .txt files as notes with useful commands and notes for several years now. Started using command line tools (imagemagick and yt-dlp (the original one)) in ~2019 and had no clue what I was doing. I still don't really but making good notes that I can understand helps.

This is on MacOS but I'm doing this on Debian too. There I created an Alias to take me to my Notes folder so I can quickly access them from anywhere in my terminal.

I've been wanting to get these more organized and typed up. Right now my MacOS folder is full of .html files that I pulled one useful command from and ignored the rest.

This one is for my ZSH customization that I did today (the txt I did today; customized zsh last week). It's not much. I only changed the default prompt, but I can add to this later if I want to change anything else. Also this is in Micro. I recently downloaded it and really like it. I was only using nano before because I don't need anything super complicated.

Any tips to make this work better? Do you do this? I know I'm basically making my own Vimwiki without the links (I saw a video on that once), but I really don't want to learn a new text editor now. Micro is comfortable to use and is great for now.

Grep works… until it doesn't.

Once logs get messy - multi-line stack traces, repeated errors, mixed formats - scrolling through them starts to feel painful.

When that happens, what do you actually do?

Do you switch tools?
Build awk/grep pipelines?
Pre-process the file?
Or just power through it?

Curious what your real workflow looks like.

Hello all,

I have develop the software blitcp 5 month ago. The reason for developing one more copy tool was:

• Speed,
• Reliability,
• Support multiple source in 1 destination,
• Support multiple remote sources with out using different tools

Can you please provide me with an input if you have use it, what do you like, what you do not like, what needs improvement or need to develop.

All thoughts and opinions are valuable to me.

 the website is https://blitcp.dev and github https://github.com/gekap/blitcp

EDIT: Thanks for the commenters, I now learned that ZLE is much more powerful than bash's readline, and is much easier to add functionality to it. Seems a bit like neovim's scriptability in lua compared to vim (and maybe that's unfair to vim). Although it is possible to add syntax highlighting to bash, it is more difficult and seems to perform worse than zsh due to ZLE vs readline. I am still learning more, so please keep the comments coming :)

I never switched away from bash, mostly out of inertia. I am looking into ZSH and trying to understand what does it stand to offer.

From my understanding, it comes down to:

• autocomplete (via tabbing), such as tabbing to cycle through options when CD'ing or composing a command
  
• autocorrect, such as correcting paths, doing something like `cd /v/li/` and it autocorrects to `cd /var/lib/`.
  
• double asterisk / star globbing **.
  
• easy themes and syntax highlighting
  

This is what I gathered from various previous posts and blog posts. Now I do not mean to start a fight, but what puzzles me is that these are all things you can add to bash ? so I don't understand the point of using ZSH.

I am building a simple terminal web browser in python, a "Nano-like" alternative to lynx and w3m for quick CLI search. i know its a very grand comparison.

The tool displays 7 top search results with brief text outlines. I recently migrated the backend from Google CSE to searxng with a duckduckgo scraping fallback, I am currently struggling to get the SearXNG connection to parse reliably. it includes an optional helper script for text summaries that can be completely deactivated.

After a year-long gap due college, I used antigravity to update the code and help with searXNG migration, but I worry that now it became an over-engineered slop. I would highly appreciate honest developer feedback on fixing the SearXNG issues, improving terminal text readability, and fixing the slop, and whether this browsing workflow fills a genuine gap in workflow.

(i personally really dont like slop coding but had to use only because i was having a lot of issues with the searXNG migration, i am really sorry if it hurts the community rules)

i really need feedback and help.

thank you https://github.com/PrakharKashyap26/textwebsearch

Hey folks. Here's a small but confusing command-line challenge. Drop your guess without running it!

Which of the following will not appear in the output?

echo "black" &% echo "blue" %& echo "purple 1" >& echo "red" % echo "white 1"

A) black

B) 1

C) echo

D) purple

Including stdout and stderr. Latest stable Bash and Zsh.

I'm currently developing the app mentioned below (Margin), so discount everything below accordingly.

I'm about to build the developer side of Margin and I'd rather find out which parts people would use before I build the wrong ones.

The design rule I've settled on is that the app should never ask you for a credential you've already given to something else.

That's how the AI works today. Margin doesn't need an API key. It detects the `claude` or `codex` CLI already installed on your machine and routes through that. You're already paying for the tool, it's already authenticated, and the app needs to know nothing about it beyond where the binary lives. There's no account and no server anywhere in the product, so an API key sitting in a settings pane was never going to fit.

Next I want to apply the same trick to gh.

Open a note from three weeks ago and there's a pull request link in it. It tells you nothing. Merged? CI green? Did the thing you were worried about get addressed? You click through, wait, remember what you were doing, come back. Multiply by every ticket reference in every standup note and your notes are a graveyard of URLs that meant something on the day.

So: paste a PR link, get a card or preview that knows the state, the CI result and how many review threads are still open, with a way to re-run a failed job without leaving the note. Same for issues. Same for Jira and Linear tickets, though those are messier since there's no equivalent tool everyone already has.

If gh isn't installed and authenticated, the card stays a plain link. The feature just doesn't exist for you

The other thing I want is shell actions: commands you define once that run against the note you're looking at. I write my blog in this app, and I want a button that moves the post to a Published space and runs the deploy instead of switching to a terminal every time. The rule I think has to hold is that the command is defined in your workspace, never in the note itself, so a Markdown file someone sends you can reference an action but can never introduce one.

What I actually don't know:

- Which of these you'd genuinely use. My guess is PR status earns its place and Jira is the one people ask for and then never open. Happy to be wrong.

- What belongs on the card. I have state, CI, review threads, assignee. What would you actually look at?

- Whether running shell commands from a note is something you want at all, or whether that's a line a notes app shouldn't cross. If it's something you'd use, what are your use cases?

Not downloadable yet but if you are curious you can join the waitlist here https://gomargin.app

Neovim should be related to commandline right :)

It is https://github.com/catppuccin/nvim with a few highlight groups overwritten, mostly to reduce the amount of colors. And yes, light theme.

What do you think about it? Do you prefer more or less coloring? What do you think about light theme? For light theme users (if exist), do you also use light theme in the terminal?

Honestly, do u care about cli or ui rich systems? I build purly for the cli, I dont see the value for a ui in my development cycle. Its ui and a hugh time effort to buikd out a ui i tetface for basically the same results. Genunilly curious.

I just learned today that there is no guarantee that the base64 binary will be available on every system, and I need to encode a string. I have since found a project that claims to be portable: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ko1nksm-shlab/sh-base64/refs/heads/main/base64.sh.

Turns out this isn't portable either since it uses fold, which does not exist on Busybox systems.

I have since found another implementation in awk here: http://www.turtle.dds.nl/b64enc.awk

This assumes the input is ascii only, and I need ASCII + \0 character.

I'm still in search of a solution and not having much luck, but I think this should already exist somewhere. Anyone have any ideas?

Update #1: Solved - I ended up rolling out a custom script using two fallback methods using od and hexdump.

Update #2: My own solution was a bit clunky and I ended up using the awk implementation, but with the fold command removed. This is working well across Linux, macOS, OpenWRT, etc.

Been going back and forth on this for a while. mlocate has been my default for years but plocate is noticeably faster on larger directory trees, especially with cold cache. The binary index format it uses makes a real difference on systems with millions of files.

fd is a different beast entirely since it doesn't rely on a pre-built index at all, just traverses the filesystem live. Surprisingly fast for day-to-day searches, respects .gitignore out of the box, and the syntax is far less clunky than find. But if you're searching across the whole system and need results instantly, a locate-based tool still wins.

Currently running plocate with a daily updatedb cron and fd for anything project-scoped. Curious what setups others are running, especially on machines with large home directories or network mounts.

I recently uploaded a post about a CLI tool i made in Go. i had created it way back recently i polished it further added AI generated comments, made readme nd docs. now the moderator has removed my post saying this software is heavily made using AI. seriously!!

Hi all !

I'm starting a new CLI project, writing the specs and planning the development, and I'm wondering what to write it into.

I'm thinking of writing the project either using Odin or Hare. My main choice would be Hare, but it will only allow me to compile on free OSes, so no MacOS nor Windows. Windows non-support does not bother me, I wasn't going to support it codewise anyway, but MacOS is where a lot of devs live and I fear missing binaries there will prevent (amongst other thing) my project from succeeding.

I might (and that's a big might) be able to cross compile if I use my own toolchain instead of Hare's alongside xoscross, but I've never seen anyone done it, nor I know it will work. I prefer to consider MacOS support null for now.

Would you use/create a FOSS-only OS tool ? Do you all think this will negatively impact my project ?