Linux Fu: Modernize Your Command Line

If you use Linux and its associated tools on the desktop or on a Raspberry Pi, or on a server, you probably have used the command line. Some people love it and some people hate it. However, many of us have been using Linux for years and sometimes Unix before that, and we tend to use the same old tried-and-true tools. [Remy Sharp] had a recent post talking about how he had created aliases to replace those old tools with great modern replacements and it is definitely worth a read.

We’ll be honest, when we first saw the post we almost skipped reading it. A lot of Linux tip posts are pretty uninteresting unless you are a total beginner. But [Remy] has a lot of really great tools and how he has them installed including bat, which is like cat but with syntax coloring (see picture above), and fzf — a command line history search on steroids. He even shows how to join fzf and bat to make a very cool file browser from the command line (see below).

That’s not all of the replacements, either. He had htop of course, which we’ve used for a long time. There are some nicer replacements for htop, like glance. There was also prettyping (that is pretty ping, not pret typing) which is a nice alternative to ping. We were less convinced of the need to replace find and grep because we are pretty happy with them and we have our own favorite replacement for diff which does launch a GUI, so we didn’t try those.

You might not like all the choices on the list — we didn’t. But that’s the nice thing about Linux. You can use what you want, more or less. Which is another of our favorite aliases, replacing more with less. We also like cdfunc and fasd and we manage all that madness using a system for putting .bash.rc under git control. That also keeps it synchronized between machines.

If you like tools to help run your system, we talked about a few before. If you don’t care for [Remy’s] choice of tldr instead of man, you might like our take on help for Bash. Of course, if you don’t mind abandoning bash, we know lots of people like Fish and zsh which have a lot of additional features, too.