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Top 23 Command-line Open-Source Projects
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Windows Terminal
The new Windows Terminal and the original Windows console host, all in the same place!
>I doubt that people think it's the engineering teams that are the problem
Did you forget Microsoft engineering response to Casey Muratori "Extremely slow performance when processing virtual terminal sequences"?
"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."
https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362#issuecomm...
followed by Casey producing evidence for his 'extremely simple' claim in couple of days.
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ui-ux-pro-max-skill
An AI SKILL that provide design intelligence for building professional UI/UX multiple platforms
UI/UX Pro Max is a skill that gives your agent actual design taste. 60,000+ stars. 50+ distinct UI styles, 97 colour palettes, 57 font pairings, 25 chart types, and design system generation. Install it and your agent stops defaulting to the same generic SaaS template.
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ripgrep
ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore
Project mention: Biff is a command line datetime Swiss army knife | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-05-27I'm the author of Biff. I just wanted to leave a really cool example of something that Biff can do that I _think_ is kinda hard to do otherwise. (And also, I want to make an assertion about it and I hope this will lead to me being wrong and learning something new.)
The use case is: "I want to see a list of all files in a repository, sorted in ascending order of when it was most recently changed according to source control. I also want to highlight the time with color, make it be in local time and format it in my own bespoke way using strftime." Here's the full command (run from the root of https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep):
$ git ls-files \ -
tldr is perfect when man pages are too detailed and you only need the common examples.
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But for reading code, scripts, configs, Markdown, YAML, JSON, or anything where your eyes are expected to survive the experience, bat is much nicer.
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Project mention: Microsoft pulled internal Claude Code licenses — what their engineers' preference tells you about picking AI tools | dev.to | 2026-06-06
Aider with a bring-your-own API key has no subscription floor. Pay per token. For 2-3 focused hours per week, costs less than $20/mo. For full-time use, costs more than Max. Best for terminal natives who already live in tmux and do not want a separate IDE.
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and it gives you a Rust dependency.
> $ rinku lookup https://github.com/spf13/cobra
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Project mention: Biff is a command line datetime Swiss army knife | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-05-27
I know that if you want `fd` (https://github.com/sharkdp/fd) you need to `apt install fd-find` and which installs the binary `fdfind` (!).
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Project mention: PM2 process management for Node.js - Why You Need PM2 Process... | dev.to | 2026-01-02
Setting this up is a breeze. I’ll walk you through the steps I use for every project. Whether it’s a small side project or a big enterprise app, the process is the same. First, you need to have Node. js installed. Then, you can grab the PM2 on GitHub package.
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For the terminal interface, I use the message model from Bubble Tea, a Go library for building TUI applications.
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For that specific use case you could also try `yazi`[0], which is a TUI file browser that has image (and other filetypes) preview built in.
[0] https://github.com/sxyazi/yazi
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Bubble Tea remains the v0.1 + v0.2 target. The v0.3 cycle starts the cross-framework work: ratatui first, then Textual, then Ink. The registry's per-frame URL prefix already accommodates the second axis; the work is in writing the adapter packs. Components stay copy-paste. The CLI keeps glyph add. The registry shape stays stable.
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zoxide — Jump to frequently used directories with z [partial name].
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Project mention: Deep Dive: How Bruno 1.0 Stores API Tests Locally vs. Postman 11.0 Cloud Sync | dev.to | 2026-04-28
Measurement Tool: hyperfine 1.18.0 (https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine), 10 warmup runs, 30 timed runs per metric
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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).
Project mention: Conquering Windows Server 2022: How to Manually Sideload Winget (Without the Microsoft Store) | dev.to | 2026-05-10Navigate to the official Winget releases page: Github winget releases
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GitHub: https://github.com/ogham/exa
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urfave/cli
A declarative, simple, fast, and fun package for building command line tools in Go (by urfave)
urfave/cli is well-suited for internal tools or smaller utilities where you want fast iteration without a large framework.
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).
Command-line discussion
Command-line related posts
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Microsoft pulled internal Claude Code licenses — what their engineers' preference tells you about picking AI tools
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I Built a Visualizer for Go's Garbage Collector
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Run Aider on Ollama, Bedrock, or Any LLM Provider — One Gateway, Every Model
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Code2prompt: Convert any folder into a single LLM prompt
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I turned an abandoned Go project into a full terminal Arcade Game
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Show HN: Firmion is a DSL for composing firmware images
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Biff is a command line datetime Swiss army knife
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 7 Jun 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source Command-line projects? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Windows Terminal | 103,469 |
| 2 | ui-ux-pro-max-skill | 87,871 |
| 3 | ripgrep | 64,851 |
| 4 | tldr | 62,777 |
| 5 | bat | 59,300 |
| 6 | PowerShell | 53,764 |
| 7 | aider | 45,826 |
| 8 | cobra | 44,062 |
| 9 | fd | 43,250 |
| 10 | PM2 | 43,203 |
| 11 | bubbletea | 42,853 |
| 12 | cheat.sh | 41,436 |
| 13 | yazi | 39,035 |
| 14 | Ink | 38,784 |
| 15 | zoxide | 37,286 |
| 16 | linux-command | 36,252 |
| 17 | modern-unix | 32,930 |
| 18 | micro-editor | 28,767 |
| 19 | hyperfine | 28,242 |
| 20 | cmder | 26,908 |
| 21 | winget-cli | 25,963 |
| 22 | exa | 24,411 |
| 23 | urfave/cli | 24,113 |
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