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Top 23 Command Line Tool Open-Source Projects
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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 \ -
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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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zoxide — Jump to frequently used directories with z [partial name].
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"The Silver Searcher" is a program written in the _same_ "unsafe" language as grep
This is obviously not analogous to Rust evangelism that targets projects written in C
The author claims the program is a clone of ack; ack is written in a "safe" language
https://geoff.greer.fm/ag/
https://beyondgrep.com/
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A fair question is why this fork of coreutils is required when the original Rust rewrite (https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/) supports Windows, in addition to Linux, macOS and wasm.
The reason seems to be a few windows specific fixes (https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/compare/main...microsoft...) which can probably be upstreamed into the main repo.
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cli
Command-line tool to customize Spotify client. Supports Windows, macOS, and Linux. (by spicetify)
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Project mention: try: Can You Find Your 2 AM Epiphany the Next Morning? — An Experimental Directory Management Tool by an ADHD Developer | dev.to | 2026-01-28
Existing directory jump tools (z, autojump, zoxide) specialize in "quickly moving to directories visited in the past".
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The previous post covered how we structured the codebase: Effect conventions, ast-grep enforcement, Drift, and CLAUDE.md to collaborate with Claude Code. You describe what you want, review the output, iterate. That works well. This post is about what happens when you step away entirely: giving the agent a list of issues and letting it work through them while you do something else. In autonomous mode, there's no mid-session correction. Anything the enforcement layer doesn't catch compounds across commits which is why clean issue tracking, issue review and end-of-session QA matter more, not less.
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sampler
Tool for shell commands execution, visualization and alerting. Configured with a simple YAML file.
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Project mention: Zml-smi: universal monitoring tool for GPUs, TPUs and NPUs | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-04-04
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ipatool
Command-line tool that allows searching and downloading app packages (known as ipa files) from the iOS App Store
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Checkstyle
Checkstyle is a development tool to help programmers write Java code that adheres to a coding standard. By default it supports the Google Java Style Guide and Sun Code Conventions, but is highly configurable. It can be invoked with an ANT task and a command line program.
Added guard rails: Added unit and integration tests, added auto code formatting with spotless, added code analysis using checkstyle
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jc
CLI tool and python library that converts the output of popular command-line tools, file-types, and common strings to JSON, YAML, or Dictionaries. This allows piping of output to tools like jq and simplifying automation scripts.
I guess I don't see those as big downsides because I don't think people usually want binary data or quoted strings back from a CLI command, nor do they want column oriented output, nor "user friendly" tables.
Answering --help with JSON is a good example, how bad is it really if the response is JSON? Well, using less works fine still and you can still grep if you want simple substring search. Wanting a section is probably more common, so maybe you'd "grep" for a subcommand with `jq .subcommand` or an option with `jq .subcommand.option`. Tables and tab-or-space delimited output overflow char limits, force the command-generator to figure out character wrapping, and so on. Now you need a library to generate CLI help properly, but if you're going to have a library why not just spit JSON and decouple completely from display details.
Structured output by default just makes sense for practically everything except `cat`. And while your markdown files or csv files might have quoted strings, looking at the raw files isn't something people really want from shells or editors.. they want something "rendered" in one way or another, for example with syntax highlighting.
Basically in 2025 neither humans nor machines benefit much from unstructured raw output. Almost any CLI that does this needs to be paired with a parser (like https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc) and/or a renderer (like https://github.com/charmbracelet/glow). If no such pairing is available then it pushes many people to separately reinvent parsers badly. JSON's not perfect but (non-minified) it's human-readable enough to address the basic issues here without jumping all the way towards binary or (shudder) HTML
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websocat
Command-line client for WebSockets, like netcat (or curl) for ws:// with advanced socat-like functions
Hmm. We don't have a WebSocket client available right, it will be coded in the next part of this article. Unluckily, curl does not have a full support for the WebSocket protocol (it can receive but not send data). Instead, we can install the browser-websocket-client open-source plugin available on the Chrome Web Store. Are you Firefox friendly? You can use Weasel and its still open-source. If you prefer a command line tool, you can also check websocat or claws.
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grex
A command-line tool and Rust library with Python bindings for generating regular expressions from user-provided test cases
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code2prompt
A CLI tool to convert your codebase into a single LLM prompt with source tree, prompt templating, and token counting.
Project mention: Code2prompt: Convert any folder into a single LLM prompt | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-05-28 -
nvitop
An interactive NVIDIA-GPU process viewer and beyond, the one-stop solution for GPU process management.
Project mention: Show HN: Sping – A HTTP/TCP Latency Tool That's Easy on the Eye | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-08-24I've frequently found myself using [nvitop](https://github.com/XuehaiPan/nvitop) to diagnose GPU/CPU contention issues.
The two best things about it are:
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 Tool discussion
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Get – tiny agent that gets anything from your computer
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Image Compression
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Automating the Localization Pipeline: Extraction to TMS to CI
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 11 Jul 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source Command Line Tool projects? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ripgrep | 65,781 |
| 2 | PM2 | 43,227 |
| 3 | zoxide | 37,802 |
| 4 | the_silver_searcher | 27,072 |
| 5 | coreutils | 23,723 |
| 6 | cli | 23,687 |
| 7 | gitui | 22,197 |
| 8 | autojump | 16,912 |
| 9 | ast-grep | 15,003 |
| 10 | tokei | 14,670 |
| 11 | sampler | 14,570 |
| 12 | broot | 12,793 |
| 13 | nvtop | 10,802 |
| 14 | lnav | 10,430 |
| 15 | q | 10,354 |
| 16 | ipatool | 9,546 |
| 17 | Checkstyle | 8,961 |
| 18 | jc | 8,632 |
| 19 | websocat | 8,583 |
| 20 | grex | 8,154 |
| 21 | miniserve | 7,695 |
| 22 | code2prompt | 7,465 |
| 23 | nvitop | 7,027 |
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