6 Command Line Tools for Productive Programmers

• broot

  41 10,068 9.1 Rust

  A new way to see and navigate directory trees : https://dystroy.org/broot

It can do lots of other things, so take a look at the GitHub guide but for me its just a better tree.

• smartcd

  1 677 0.0 Shell

  Alter your bash (or zsh) environment as you cd

If you live in the terminal, and you want to use your terminal as an IDE, then it's helpful to have your terminal change based on the current directory. There are many ways to do this. DirEnv loads and unloads .env files as you enter directories. smartcd is similar. It lets you run a shell script whenever you change to a certain path -- you can start and stop services, change the prompt, or anything else you want.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• funky

  2 635 0.0 Python

  Funky takes shell functions to the next level by making them easier to define, more flexible, and more interactive.

However, my favorite of this genre is the strangely named funky, which "takes shell functions to the next level by making them easier to define, more flexible, and more interactive."

• fzf

  407 59,739 9.6 Go

  :cherry_blossom: A command-line fuzzy finder

FZF is a command-line fuzzy finder. It's fast, and it interactively lets you filter options down based on a fuzzy keyword match in many places where you need to input a value at the command-line.

• mcfly

  49 6,545 7.2 Rust

  Fly through your shell history. Great Scott!

FZF is excellent for filtering file paths in a command line when you want to open a file (vim **), but for command-line completion, there is more information available than the raw history file. McFly attempts to use this extra information to provide more relevant results.

• autojump

  46 15,929 0.0 Python

  A cd command that learns - easily navigate directories from the command line

However, many tools exist which attempt to improve upon cd. autojump, z, and Fasd all track directory usage and give you a single key shortcut for changing to commonly accessed directories. r/commandline has an detailed discussion of these various cd replacements, but the one that has the most momentum is zoxide. zoxide is a rewrite of z in Rust and promises improved speed.

• pandoc

  420 32,396 9.8 Haskell

  Universal markup converter

There are many other helpful command-line tools. More than can be covered well in a single article. JQ, mitmproxy, Pandoc, and PSTree are some I use frequently. There is also a whole class of Rust rewrites of common POSIX tools that warrant an article of their own.

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• z

  46 16,036 3.9 Shell

  z - jump around

However, many tools exist which attempt to improve upon cd. autojump, z, and Fasd all track directory usage and give you a single key shortcut for changing to commonly accessed directories. r/commandline has an detailed discussion of these various cd replacements, but the one that has the most momentum is zoxide. zoxide is a rewrite of z in Rust and promises improved speed.

• direnv

  157 11,697 8.7 Go

  unclutter your .profile

  

If you live in the terminal, and you want to use your terminal as an IDE, then it's helpful to have your terminal change based on the current directory. There are many ways to do this. DirEnv loads and unloads .env files as you enter directories. smartcd is similar. It lets you run a shell script whenever you change to a certain path -- you can start and stop services, change the prompt, or anything else you want.

• fasd

  18 5,736 0.0 Shell

  Discontinued Command-line productivity booster, offers quick access to files and directories, inspired by autojump, z and v.

However, many tools exist which attempt to improve upon cd. autojump, z, and Fasd all track directory usage and give you a single key shortcut for changing to commonly accessed directories. r/commandline has an detailed discussion of these various cd replacements, but the one that has the most momentum is zoxide. zoxide is a rewrite of z in Rust and promises improved speed.

• zoxide

  100 18,590 8.2 Rust

  A smarter cd command. Supports all major shells.

However, many tools exist which attempt to improve upon cd. autojump, z, and Fasd all track directory usage and give you a single key shortcut for changing to commonly accessed directories. r/commandline has an detailed discussion of these various cd replacements, but the one that has the most momentum is zoxide. zoxide is a rewrite of z in Rust and promises improved speed.

• gitupdate

  2 105 2.8 Go

  Commit and push updated files with file names as commit message

gitupdate is a simple improvement on this idea. gitupdate . commits your files but uses the file names (but not extensions) of the changed files to create a more meaningful commit message. It's great for times when the commit message doesn't matter.

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