Last week I finally switched my laptop to Linux (I choose Pop!_OS and I’m very happy with it). After installing all the tools and software I needed for my day to day work I found a repository that listed a lot of modern UNIX tools that are alternatives to common commands. They are absolutely stunning and I fell in love with them. For this reason I wanted to share the ones I like the most with you in this post. Let’s stop wasting time and let’s deep dive into those beautiful tools!
1. bat
Reference: https://github.com/sharkdp/bat
A cat(1) clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration. This is not just way more beautiful than cat, it is also quite more powerful. It has:
- Syntax Highlightning
- Git integration
- Shows non-printable characters
- Automatic paging
- Good integration with other tools
You can easily install it on Ubuntu with apt:
sudo apt install batIt could install it as batcat due to a name clash with another package. If so you can simply run:
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/batcat /usr/local/bin/bat2. exa
Reference: https://github.com/ogham/exa
exa is a modern replacement for the venerable file-listing command-line program ls that ships with Unix and Linux operating systems, giving it more features and better defaults. It uses colours to distinguish file types and metadata. It knows about symlinks, extended attributes, and Git. And it’s small, fast, and just one single binary.
Even in this case you can easily install through your package manager, for example on Ubuntu you just have to run:
sudo apt install exa3. delta
Reference: https://github.com/dandavison/delta
