Command Line Utilities

I started using the command line over 30 years ago for navigating my operating system and basic scripting. My shell progression was:

1. MS-DOS - hobby prgramming
2. C shell on BSD Unix - university
3. Korn shell on SunOS/Solaris - early career
4. Bash on Linux (and now Windows) - everything since

These days, I spend the majority of my time in the terminal. I use Bash shell inside Alacritty or GNOME Terminal with a pretty customized configuration (lots of aliases and functions).

It’s pretty amazing how many things invented in the early days of Unix are still so useful today. However, there are lots of modern utilities that make using a terminal easier and faster.

Here are my go-to utilities that make life much better:

• ripgrep - a better grep
• fd - a better find
• eza - a better ls
• bat - a better cat
• zoxide - jump to directories
• fzf - fuzzy finder

All of these are cross-platform and work in all POSIX (and some not-so-POSIX) shells.