Why is fzf, the best utility, relegated to the end? And why is ripgrep - a huge improvement over grep, especially if you want to search only on committed files in a git directory - not even mentioned? This list is outrageous. Even more so because I can't pretend to have known about all of these before, and annoyingly now have to face the fact that some of these actually look pretty handy.
this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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I had a feeling this would be controversial π
Am local village idiot curious as to why this would be controversial.
First guess: advising change from familiar workflow
Second guess: gotta download a lot of these
3rd thing: these tools may not be available on the remote server at your company. so you don't want to stumble on the commands (aliases exist but the outputs are wildly different)
The problem is the standard apps are just that - standard. I can hop onto any Redhat, Debian or Solaris 10 box at work and use ls, cat etc.
If I went all-in on some bespoke alternatives on my special snowflake machine, I'd constantly be going nuts entering incorrect commands on remote machines and losing efficiency. Then, I'd go back to just using the standard commands everywhere.
They're not though are they. Remember the pain of the last time you tried to write a portable sed then just gave up and used a `perl -pe'? That's real. We've all been there.
Who doesn't already use rsync?
Anyway I'll give zoxide and eza a shot.
I have used it a couple times but I was unsure if using it to simply replace cp or mv commands was "proper"
Bat looks the most useful for me
You can also let bat render your man pages, with some nicer coloration (and theming) than man does by default.
I fkn knew eza would be at the top of this list.
E: I can't talk, though. Here are my aliases:
alias ls='eza --time-style="+%Y-%m-%d" --group-directories-first --hyperlink --colour=never -hlF always --icons --git'
alias ll='eza --time-style="long-iso" --group-directories-first --no-permissions --hyperlink --colour=never -hoalF always --icons --git'
alias l='eza --time-style=relative --group-directories-first --hyperlink --colour=auto -hlF=always --icons --no-permissions --no-user'
I'm running Linux Mint, I installed eza, which is nice but the icons are not showing up correctly.
Do you know how to get them to show correctly, I installed 'nerd fonts' but I'm not sure I got the correct one.
Don't worry. It works fine in the regular terminal, it is just quake that is giving me issues.
I didn't install anything special, just used apt (on ubuntu), like sudo apt install eza. Looks like I'm using the font DejaVuSansMono.
What terminal/emulator are you using?
you have to install a nerd font i guess. nerd-fonts dot com.
All good now.
It is a problem with guake.
I know what I'm doing tomorrow!
Ferb nods in approval!
Start today! Replace "ls" with "dir /w"!
Can someone give me a summary? That website keeps crashing my browser..
ls to eza
cat to bat
cp/scp to rsync
find to fd
cd to zoxide
Are some of the commands replaced by Manjaro or similar? For me, it's normal to call ls and see colors...
The default output of ls is uncolored, but some distros include an alias in your .bashrc for 'ls' to 'ls --color=auto', so you definitely don't need a whole other utility just for colored output
Eza is a lot more than just ls with colours though.
Wow, pretty cool the tree and total size options, kind of substitutes other commands I commonly use.
Only thing is though I find it slower than du and tree.
You can also try something like broot. Lovely TUI file manager that shows how big folders are when you start it with the -w option, faster than either du or tree in my experience.
That's true, I was mostly speaking to that specific use-case. It certainly sounds like it has generally superior functionality to ls, but for me personally it doesn't beat out the utility of already being present on every linux system I'll touch.
That's unlike something like rsync which is genuinely more useful than scp for anything other than simple file transfers.
Yeah that's fair, I only use it on systems where I'm in full control and use enough to get all my toys set up properly, which goes for all the commands in the article. I've just aliased ls to eza though, so it'll mostly (options are a bit different) keep working on any system I'm on.
reboot to rm -rf ~/
One thing I will agree with is to stop using SCP.
https://www.brightblack.net/blog/2024-02-09-scp-was-deprecated/
It was deprecated a while back and older, but more experienced Unix wizards still suggest it. SFTP is an alternative, but rsync also works.
Nice list of commands! I'll definitely check out eza.
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Unable to locate package batcatI believe the package name is bat.
Thanks, my bad!
No
Yeah, all good and nice, but as long as they are not part of all linux distributions, I will not use them. I need a ls because I know it is working on all machines that I use. Additionally, donβt forget that introducing new tools also introduces new attack surfaces, something you want to avoid on very important servers.