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").
just: Just, a modernization of the venerable Make.

Quality-Of-Life command line improvements.

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

Other collections

The moreutils collection.

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