Modern Unix Tools

Modern problems require modern solutions.

This is a collection of very useful utilities that I've collected by asking the internet "What modern utilities should be a standard part of a modern unixy distro and why?"

Additions and corrections via raised issue or pull requests are welcome.

Utilities

System use and management

• htop, "a cross-platform interactive process viewer".
• An htop-like utility called bottom also got some votes.
• tmux, a terminal multiplexer.
• Some people mentioned screen, the classic tool in this space, but noted that it's getting pretty long in the tooth and tmux is a pure improvement.
• HTTPie, a CURL-adjacentish command-line HTTP client for testing and debugging web APIs.
  • Xh is related, described as reimplementing a subset of HTTPie's interface with an emphasis on simplicity and speed.
• glow, a markdown-on-the-command-line tool.
• Lowdown, also a markdown tool, also interesting.
• fzf, a command-line "fuzzy finder".
• tldr - simplified man pages with practical examples. The world has needed this for a long time.
• zsh: A modernized, modular update to Bash with a lot of new utility built in. ** OhMyZsh + Alacritty: this trifecta of terminal emulator, shell and shell extensions turns out to be a powerful combination.
• Tree: show you the tree structure of directories, a bit like microdosing on Midnight Commander from back in the day.
• Broot: better navigation of directory trees.
• atool, a set of scripts that wrap common compressed-file-format handlers.
• mcfly: replaces the usual ctrl-r shell-history search handler with a more powerful tool, super cool.
• ncdu, friend of htop and a nice disk usage display for the terminal.
• LazyDocker and LazyGit, CLI improvements for Docker and Git respectively.

Data management

A collection of modern data migration, conversion and management tools.

• Gron, a tool for making JSON greppable.
• VisiData: a tabular data visualization multitool.
• jq and jid are both fantastic tools for inspecting and manipulating JSON.
• duc, also a nice drive-use visualizer.
• rclone, a cloud-storage data-moving multitool.
• csvkit: if you spend a lot of time working with comma-separated values, accept no substitutes.
• matplotlib: the upgrade over gnuplot you've been waiting for.
• xidel: this looks like jq-for-html, and I'm intrigued.
• nushell: A structured-data pipeline-building shell.
• miller, a CSV multitool.
• st, "Simple Statistics", a command-line app that calculates the sum, mean, standard deviation, and a few other things about a set of numbers.
• ijq, an "interactive jq".
• Datamash: Gnu, I know, but an interesting command-line-math tool.

Specialized Tools

"Do one thing and do it well."

• LatexDiff: Like it says on the tin, Diff for Latex.
• dyff: diff for yaml.

Revisiting The Classics

A collection of tools best described as "A better $X"

• duf a better df.
• ripgrep, a line-oriented search tool, described as a better grep.
• sd, a better sed.
• fd, a better find
• bat, a better cat.
• dust, a better du.
• lsd and exa, new takes on the venerable ls.
• There's also zoxide: an interesting update to, of all things, cd!
• ag: the Silver Searcher, a better ack (which was in turn born "a better grep").

Quality-Of-Life command line improvements.

• the "ducks" alias.
• Re-upping OhMyZsh here for its remarkable collection of plugins

Other collections

• The moreutils collection.