My current oxidised toolkit

Hi folks, It's been a bit over 2 years since my Oxidise your Command Line video, and as people ask for updates now and then, I thought I'd finally make a post.

(Video coming very soon, hopefully before RustWeek 2025, which I'm attending next week!)

This patron-only update is to thank you for supporting me! :-)

Standard Tools

The tools I've replaced with modern oxidised versions

Uutils (rust)

• A REPLACEMENT FOR ALL GNU COREUTILS

• Using the nixos uutils-coreutils-noprefix package, all gnu coreutils are swapped out for aliases to uutils' version

• If you're on any other operating system - INCLUDING WINDOWS - you can grab the binary from https://github.com/uutils/coreutils or find it packaged for your package manager

• Only do this if you want to be the life of every party, and for every day to be a party

Fish (rust)

• The Rust rewrite released in February! https://fishshell.com/blog/new-in-40/)

• though a non-standard shell (you wouldn't write shell scripts in it), it's lovely for interactive use

• batteries included, even a web-based theme chooser - feels like running other shells with loads of plugins

• finally, a shell for the 90s!

• Honourable mention: Nushell, a pure rust radical take on what a shell can do

Du-dust (rust)

• graphical disk usage analyser

• On my machine, 600GB analysed in 2 seconds, compared to 30 for du

Ripgrep (rust)

• the first rust program I ever knowingly used, I think!

• the fastest grepper in town

• has a smart defaults that ignore many files we aren't usually concerned with, even reads the .gitignore file to do so

• searches 600GB in 1 minute even on my mid-tier thinkpad, only double what du did

Fd (rust)

• a fast, pretty, drop-in replacement for find

bat (rust)

• the cat with wings!

• syntax highlighting of basically every file type

• alias cat=bat

Zoxide (rust)

• alias cd=zoxide for a drop-in replacement

• but it also knows where you've been, so instead of typing cd /home/username/projects/coolproject/ you can type cd coolproject from anywhere, and it'll usually do what you want

Eza (rust)

• Alias ls=eza and you get a drop-in replacement that supports colours and git status

• fork of exa, which stopped being developed in 2021

Xh (rust)

• A simpler interface than curl

• with pretty-printed output

• a rust rewrite of the excellent httpie

Zellij (rust)

• tmux/screen replacement

• great defaults, great UI, great plugin community

Gitui (rust)

• nice rust port of lazygit (go), which is also a great option

• At the moment I also have an alias set up to commit with meteor (go), which interactively coaches me into writing better git commits in a standard format.

• a great alternative to `git commit -am 'updates'

Jj (rust)

• This might also be in my future, but you never know with a google project...

Non-standard Cli Tools

I recommend these to anyone because they're COOL!

starship.rs (rust)

• A really fast informative shell prompt, works with all shells

Yazi (rust)

• the best command-line file manager I've found

• it's like ranger but modern

• fast, and backgrounds long operations (like copying large files)

• vim bindings

• IMAGE PREVIEW (if used with kitty, ghostty, etc)

Hyperfine (rust)

• genius cli benchmarking tool

• runs the command a sensible number of times to eliminate run-to-run variance, with an initial discarded run to warm up any caches

Evil-helix (rust)

• a fork of helix, mostly putting the keyboard bindings back to vim

• helix is a batteries-included vim-y editor in a single binary, but with backwards keybindings by default

• I keep it around for when I break my vim config...

Non-rust Tools that Are Awesome

(but I'd love you to tell me that there are rust rewrites!)

Tmate (c)

• tmux fork that instantly share a terminal session with someone by ssh or web

• tmate.io run an intermediary server so you don't need to faff with firewall settings

• if I'm pairing with my mentees, this is what we use to run cargo bacon etc

Kitty (go)

• (or if you prefer more GUI, ghostty, written in zig)

• GPU accelerated terminal

• IMAGE SUPPORT

  • used by in yazi and the image.nvim plugin

Fzf (go)

• fzf fuzzy finds files so fast it doesn't need to build an index

• used as a backend for many programs (like my fav neovim distro, lazynvim.org)

• on my mid-tier thinkpad, searches ~100k files/s

• skim (rust) might be a good interactive replacement, but I would still keep fzf around for use by other tools

Jq (c)

• pretty-print and query json

What am I missing?!

Thank you so much again for your support,
Tris