The Library

TOOL TUTORIALS · WE ATTEMPT TO TEST ON ALL VERSIONS

Find & navigate

fd
The find replacement that respects .gitignore, colors its output, and takes the sane argument order.
ripgrep
grep that respects your .gitignore and finishes before you lift your finger off Enter. rg is what grep dreams of being.
fzf
A fuzzy finder for everything: pipe any list into it, pick a line, act on it. Ctrl-R will never be the same.
zoxide
A smarter cd that learns your habits: type z partial-name and land in the right directory, ranked by frequency and recency.
eza
ls that grew up: git status in the listing, tree view, sane dates — keep the muscle memory, drop the pain.

bat
cat that adds syntax highlighting, line numbers, and git gutter marks — without ever getting in grep’s way.
glow
Read Markdown in the terminal. Width, style, and a pager when you want one.
tldr
Community-written example pages for any command. tldr tar gives you the five incantations you actually need instead of a 4,000-line man page.

delta
A git diff pager with structure and color — two config lines and every patch becomes readable again.
lazygit
A full git TUI: stage hunks interactively, rebase interactively, read a diff without squinting, undo a bad commit. Makes git’s 200-verb CLI feel calm.
gh
GitHub’s own CLI: issues, pull requests, releases, and the raw REST/GraphQL API — authenticated and scriptable from one command. You’ll never alt-tab to open a PR again.

jq
The JSON power tool: reformat API responses, rename keys, flatten config files, and pull exactly the fields you want from a 40,000-line log-dump-as-JSON.
yq
jq for YAML: read keys, edit in place, convert to JSON — stop hand-editing indentation at 2am.
miller
CSV and JSON from the shell. The command is mlr, not miller.
column
The one-flag fix for ragged terminal output: ls -l | column -t snaps any column-shaped mess into a real table. Been in BSD since the 80s, ships everywhere.
sd
Find and replace. Pattern, replacement, file. Preview before it writes.
xh
curl’s ergonomic younger sibling: xh POST api.dev/users name=ada — JSON built, headers handled, output colorized. HTTPie’s spirit, Rust’s speed.

tmux copy mode
The trick most tmux users never learn: scroll, search, and copy any pane’s scrollback with keyboard navigation and a buffer you can pipe anywhere.
atuin
Replaces your shell history with a searchable, filterable database: “show me that rsync I ran in /srv last Tuesday that failed.” SQLite under the hood, sync optional.
direnv
Project env vars that load when you enter the directory and leave when you do.
just
A justfile for the commands you actually type. No Make guessing.
entr
Hand it filenames. It runs your command when one of them changes.
shellcheck
Reads a shell script and names the bug before a space in a filename finds it.
hyperfine
Benchmark shell commands with warmup and real statistics — settle “which is faster” without lying to yourself.

openssl
The crypto Swiss Army knife you already have installed: hashes, base64, random passwords, live TLS cert inspection, self-signed certs, and file encryption — six recipes.
age
Encrypt a file to a public key. Decrypt with the identity. No certificate dance.
rsync
Copy the difference, not the whole tree. Dry-run before --delete.

btop
A system monitor that finally looks as good as the info is useful — CPU per core, GPU stats, network, disks, and process control in one terminal pane.
procs
ps with columns you can read, and a word to filter on.
duf
df for humans: mounts in a clean table, sane units, JSON output for scripts, and it highlights the disk that’s about to ruin your week.
dust
du with a bar chart — see which directory is eating the disk in one glance.
ncdu
Disk usage you can walk into. Save the scan if the tree is slow.
lazydocker
Containers, logs, and compose in one screen. Needs a running Docker daemon.