I like the trend of refining existing tools. You take tried-and-true commands and shave off the rough edges and quirks. I use ripgrep instead of grep, fd instead of find, scm_breeze on top of git, dust instead of du, duf instead of df, z over cd, and xh instead of curl

I always thought openSUSE’s package manager zypper has quite a few neat ideas:

• It offers two-letter shorthands for subcommands, so zypper install→ zypper in, update → up, remove → rm.
• When it lists what packages it will install or remove, it will list them with the first letter highlighted in a different color, kind of like so: fish git texlive
  This makes it really easy to visually scan the package list, and since it’s sorted alphabetically, it also makes it easier to find a particular package you might be looking for.
  And while there’s separate lists for packages to be added vs. updated vs. removed, they also color those letters in green vs. yellow vs. red, so you can immediately see what’s what.
• When it lists items (other than packages), it prints an ID number, too.
  So, zypper repos gives you a list of your repositories, numberered 1, 2, 3 etc., and then if you want to remove a repo, you can run zypper removerepo 3.
• When you run a zypper search, it prints the results in a nicely formatted table.

Documentation: https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/tumbleweed/zypper/

man

Pure cli or also TUI? When it comes to TUI probably yazi is my most used tool right now, use it pretty much every day. For pure cli i would probably give my vote to sed. I use the crap out of it in a bunch of scripts. For example i switch my themes with it by replacing whatever import i had in the config to the desired theme, then reload the programs.

A well-designed CLI? Maybe sed. A badly designed CLI? Probably also sed.

nmon

That, along with tmux and htop, are installed on everything I have.

nmon then ld- give me a system health page that shows me where the bottleneck is.

It’s interesting to see how a system behaves when you’re doing something like a backup… it’s not always what you think.

I think git is the obvious choice, both in ergonomics and flexibility (custom commands). But maybe I’m just using it so much I don’t recognize the sharp edges as much anymore.

find and rename/perl-rename/prename (depending on your distro), are two of my favorite cli tools. I generally find both well designed and easy to use. For me, they are indispensable.

There are many modern alternatives to common Unix commands, often written in rust, or provided in Nushell, that showcase that. Here are some common themes I like:

Good defaults: You shouldn’t have to memorize tar -xzvf just to extract a tar file; The thing you’re most likely to want to do should be the default. But other use cases should still be achievable through the use of flags. Make simple thing easy and difficult things possible.

Subcommands: It helps separate and discover the different functions of a CLI. Paired with a help subcommand, you can quickly look up information for the subcommand you’re actually interested in.

Domain specific languages: Many problems already have a solution in the form of a DSL, such as Regex or SQL. My favourite example for this is httpie, which lets you specify the type, body and parameters of an HTTP request without touching any flags.

I also much prefer long flags over short ones, because they are self-documenting.

I think it depends a lot on what kind of application you’re thinking of. Here are some examples of tools that I particularly remember for having nice CLI interfaces, but they are all slightly different in terms of the number of operations/entities they support.

Single operation, a lot of different types of data: httpie

httpie is a CLI HTTP client. It allows to generate fairly complex requests, choose which diagnostic information you want to see, etc.

Examples:

$ https httpie.io/hello
$ http PUT pie.dev/put X-API-Token:123 name=John
$ http -v pie.dev/get

Several operations, a lot of parameters: Bazel

Bazel is a build system. There are only a handful of operations you typically perform (build, run, test, query), but they all follow the same pattern.

Examples:

$ bazel build //app
$ bazel --quiet build //app -c opt
$ bazel --quiet run //app -c opt -- --port=1234

Multiple entites, multiple operations: LVM

I really liked the interface of Linux Volume Manager tools. They consist of multiple commands that follow the same pattern, and use the same flags for options.

Examples:

# vgcreate -n vg_name
# vgs
# pvcreate /dev/sda
# vgextend vg_name /dev/sda
# lvcreate vg_name -n lv_name -L5G
# lvresize vg_name/lv_name -L+1G
# lvs

Not what you asked, but anything that uses a single hyphen for longopts can just fuck off. I’m talking to you Terraform.

i’ve been a big fan of Jujutsu (jj) since adopting it a few weeks ago. things i used to avoid with git like proper rebasing and focused commits become so much easier, in addition to the benefits of conflicts being easier to handle. the learning curve i thought was going to be grueling only took a couple days to get used to, and honestly interop with GitHub and my team’s particular workflow were the hard parts. so not only is it useful, powerful, and becoming more important to my workflow all the time, it’s a joy to use compared to git.

i guess honorable mention to zoxide, which has basically replaced cd for me since it does everything cd does but also keeps a small db of your most commonly visited directories so you can just do z Downloads or z my_project or whatever from any directory

Ncmpcpp. I’ve been using it for so long that using other cli music players is almost a no go. Learning a new muscle memory wouldn’t be worth it. Album art would be nice but I’m listening to music and staring at the album art for hours. The metadata editor is really nice. It’s old reliable.

No-one mentioned ‘jq’ yet.

Maybe there’s a reason for that!

does ncurses stuff count or is TUI cheating?