SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives Learn more →
Top 23 Command-line Open-Source Projects
-
Windows Terminal
The new Windows Terminal and the original Windows console host, all in the same place!
Project mention: Deleting Software I Wrote Upon Leaving Employment of a Company | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-03-15> convince management of the value
This presupposes that such convincing is even possible. Many, many companies have leadership that are simply terrible at identifying value. If you've never been part of a majority of developers advocating for, if not outright begging for, some huge ROI initiative to get the green light, you are very fortunate.
There are great counterexamples, like Valve, which is known for giving developers an extreme degree of autonomy, and they benefit greatly from that approach. For each Valve, though, there are dozens of companies that manage to succeed despite themselves.
Take Microsoft, for example. One tiny, yet representative, example: the way the Windows Terminal team handled a suggestion from Casey Muratori to take their software from abysmally slow to lightning fast:
https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362
A quote from one of the Terminal developers, dismissing the suggestion:
> I believe what you’re doing is describing something that might be considered an entire doctoral research project in performant terminal emulation as “extremely simple” somewhat combatively…
Just how difficult was such an endeavor in actuality? Well, given that Casey implemented his own terminal emulator from scratch and incorporated the functionality he was proposing in a mere weekend... not a whole lot. Relatively minor effort for a huge return on investment. It took Casey explaining the concepts, then providing a working proof of concept, and finally a bunch of backlash online towards the Terminal team to get them to do the right thing for themselves and their users.
-
A bit of an aside, but I really like "guides to things we otherwise take for granted". So few man pages are built around example use cases, but those are often what make the case for a tool!
A similar spirit to projects like https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr/ , but this has a lot more useful detail.
The ripgrep author has a blog post on performance and benchmarking that is an interesting read in itself: https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/
-
InfluxDB
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.
-
That’s the same as bat:[1] one of the features is syntax highlighting. Kind of unexpected to find a concatenation program… which also does that.
-
ripgrep
ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore
Basic code searching skills seems like something new developers are never explicitly taught, but which is an absolutely crucial skill to build early on.
I guess the knowledge progression I would recommend would look something kind this:
- Learning about Ctrl+F, which works basically everywhere.
- Transitioning to ripgrep https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep - I wouldn't even call this optional, it's truly an incredible and very discoverable tool. Requires keeping a terminal open, but that's a good thing for a newbie!
- Optional, but highly recommended: Learning one of the powerhouse command line editors. Teenage me recommended Emacs; current me recommends vanilla vim, purely because some flavor of it is installed almost everywhere. This is so that you can grep around and edit in the same window.
- In the same vein, moving back from ripgrep and learning about good old fashioned grep, with a few flags rg uses by default: `grep -r` for recursive search, `grep -ri` for case insensitive recursive search, and `grep -ril` for case insensitive recursive "just show me which files this string is found in" search. Some others too, season to taste.
- Finally hitting the wall with what ripgrep can do for you and switching to an actual indexed, dedicated code search tool.
-
msiexec.exe /package https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v7.2.6/PowerShell-7.2.6-win-x64.msi /quiet ADD_EXPLORER_CONTEXT_MENU_OPENPOWERSHELL=1 ADD_FILE_CONTEXT_MENU_RUNPOWERSHELL=1 ENABLE_PSREMOTING=1 REGISTER_MANIFEST=1 USE_MU=1 ENABLE_MU=1 ADD_PATH=1
-
Project mention: PM2: Production Process Manager with a Built-In Load Balancer | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-04-06
-
-
WorkOS
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.
-
We can use the flag with --date or -date, Go already does the automatic check. We can make our entire boilerplate with this approach, but let's make it a little easier and use the Cobra CLI package.
-
Project mention: Level Up Your Dev Workflow: Conquer Web Development with a Blazing Fast Neovim Setup (Part 1) | dev.to | 2024-03-16
ripgrep: A super-fast file searcher. You can install it using your system's package manager (e.g., brew install ripgrep on macOS). fd: Another blazing-fast file finder. Installation instructions can be found here: https://github.com/sharkdp/fd
-
- Learning "modern" tools like ripgrep and fzf (There's a list here: https://github.com/ibraheemdev/modern-unix)
-
I've always wanted to build a CLI tool, and when I realized that you can build one using React with Ink, I converted my Python script into a CLI tool.
-
[Windows only]
I recently discovered Cmder:
https://cmder.app/
It's a portable console emulator and gives you the ability to "place your own executable files into the bin folder to be injected into your PATH" when it's run.
So far I've added:
jq
-
-
-
Project mention: A ‘Software Developer’ Knows Enough to Deliver Working Software Alone and in Teams | /r/programming | 2023-12-06
It depends on the scale of the project but man, if you can't build a simple CRUD app in your preferred stack and deploy it in some fashion (even if it's just a binary posted on some website, kinda like Exa) then that's just disappointing...
-
winget-cli
WinGet is the Windows Package Manager. This project includes a CLI (Command Line Interface), PowerShell modules, and a COM (Component Object Model) API (Application Programming Interface).
GitHub
-
Project mention: Best practices for distributing and updating a Go CLI on Linux? | /r/golang | 2023-05-18
Can you use a framework like urfavecli https://github.com/urfave/cli? This will auto-update every time it detects a new version from your CLI's GitHub repository
-
-
Project mention: Bun - The One Tool for All Your JavaScript/Typescript Project's Needs? | dev.to | 2024-04-02
And then I used hyperfine to run the benchmarks on my MacBook Pro 14 M2 Max, and here are the results:
-
Inquirer.js is a handy tool for adding interactive prompts to your CLI.
-
-
If you want a file full browser experience choose nnn: https://github.com/jarun/nnn . If you have a desktop file for Helix you can use the Gnome Files program to make all your programming language files open in Helix.
-
Project mention: Say good bye to cd and hello Zoxide - the better and smarter cd command | dev.to | 2024-04-14
-
SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
The latest post mention was on 2024-04-14.
Command-line related posts
- termui: Golang Terminal Dashboard
- Say good bye to cd and hello Zoxide - the better and smarter cd command
- The power of the CLI with Golang and Cobra CLI
- Show HN: Cheat.sh Client
- Show HN: Geojson-shave, a tool for reducing the size of GeoJSON files
- Show HN: Extensible OpenAPI linter written in go
- AST-grep(sg) AST grep based on Treesitter
-
A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 16 Apr 2024
Index
What are some of the best open-source Command-line projects? This list will help you:
| Project | Stars | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Windows Terminal | 93,297 |
| 2 | tldr | 48,192 |
| 3 | bat | 46,217 |
| 4 | ripgrep | 44,594 |
| 5 | PowerShell | 43,197 |
| 6 | PM2 | 40,615 |
| 7 | cheat.sh | 37,399 |
| 8 | cobra | 35,827 |
| 9 | fd | 31,392 |
| 10 | modern-unix | 29,600 |
| 11 | Ink | 25,724 |
| 12 | cmder | 25,538 |
| 13 | micro-editor | 23,832 |
| 14 | bubbletea | 23,738 |
| 15 | exa | 23,238 |
| 16 | winget-cli | 22,072 |
| 17 | urfave/cli | 21,565 |
| 18 | neofetch | 20,276 |
| 19 | hyperfine | 19,777 |
| 20 | Inquirer.js | 19,326 |
| 21 | fx | 18,452 |
| 22 | nnn | 18,136 |
| 23 | zoxide | 18,117 |
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
www.saashub.com