Advanced (CLI) tools for coders & hackers

03 Aug 2023 | 659 words | about 3 minutes to read

This article is aimed at the advanced coder/hacker and exclusively includes tools that go far beyond the standards such as “bash”, “nano”, or “git”.

I am writing this text because I repeatedly see users struggling with outdated tools, even though there have been better alternatives available for years. I can only recommend that you remain open-minded and occasionally question your setup in order to stay up to date.

If you’re working a lot with AWS I recommend visiting their AWS Labs repo!

Terminal emulators

Terminals are indispensable in our everyday lives. As a follower of the Unix philosophy, I appreciate minimal programs that can be tailored to personal preferences. On Macs, I use Alacritty (with tabs through tmux - but it’s also possible to use it with tabbed), and on Linux systems, I use st from suckless.

In general, my need for tabs in a terminal depends on the window manager of the system I am using. If I am using a tiling window manager, I usually don’t need tabs.

shell

I have been using fish as my default shell for some time now. Like many of us, I started with bash, switched to zsh at some point, and now I’ve ended up with fish. Fish provides most of the functions that I had to add to zsh, out of the box, and yet it remains quite lightweight.

CLI

Here are some general CLI tools I’m using in my role as a DevOps engineer. Some of them are extended versions of tools you may already be familiar with.

zoxide

zoxide is an advanced version of cd. It remembers which directories you use most frequently, so you can “jump” to them in just a few keystrokes and works with all major shells.

exa

exa is a modern replacement for ls. Giving it more features and better defaults. It uses colours to distinguish file types and metadata. It knows about symlinks, extended attributes, and Git.

fzf

fzf is a command-line fuzzy finder that completely replaces your reverse-i-search.

fd

fd is a replacement for find. While it does not aim to support all of find’s powerful functionality, it provides sensible (opinionated) defaults for a majority of use cases.

ripgrep

ripgrep is a line-oriented search tool that recursively searches the current directory for a regex pattern. By default, ripgrep will respect gitignore rules and automatically skip hidden files/directories and binary files.

If you’re using neovim, you could use the telescope plugin to employ ripgrep for swift file searches within your editor.

terminal user interfaces

k9s

To manage k8s in style, I recommend using k9s. It is an excellent terminal UI tool that utilizes some vim keybindings, thus significantly enhancing your workflow speed!

lazygit

For me, lazygit is an excellent Git tool. It’s fast, operates within the terminal, and I can integrate it into my neovim setup. It really simplifies and enhances the management of your version control tasks.

Graphical interfaces

Last but not least, entering the realm of graphical interfaces. Most of the time, I use tiling window managers because they are more efficient for me and offer the ability to be highly customized.

dwm

My favorite (dynamic) tiling window manager is dwm. Written in C, its source code is designed to never exceed 2000 SLOC.

It is easy to customize, usable in a multi-monitor setup, fast, small, and remains consistent.

yabai & sketchybar

On Macs, I would prefer to use yabai, along with sketchybar. Although I haven’t designed my environment with these tools yet, I would say that this combination is ideal if you want to work on a Mac while retaining the need for a tiling window manager.