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Modern Linux tools

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Re: Modern Linux tools

#31

Post by drob518 »

andai wrote: post #10
0x37 wrote: post #9

These may be objectively superior (I haven't tested), but I have come to realize (like so many others) that if you ever change your OS installation, set up VMs, or SSH anywhere, preferring these is just an uphill battle that never ends. I don't want to have to set these up in every new environment I operate in, or even use a mix of these on my personal computer and the traditional ones elsewhere. Learn the classic to…

I wanted to say we should just stick with what Unix shipped forever. But doesn't GNU already violate that idea?

Well, even “Unix” had some differences (BSD switches vs SysV switches). Theoretically, POSIX was supposed to smooth that out, but it never went away. Today, people are more likely to be operating in a GNU Linux environment than anything else (that just a market share fact, not a moral judgement, BSD lovers). Thus, for most people, GNU is the baseline.

Re: Modern Linux tools

#32

Post by ed_blackburn »

lucasoshiro wrote: post #28
anthk wrote: post #15

Modern doesn't always mean better. A better replacement for mplayer was mpv, and in some cases mplayer was faster than mpv (think about legacy machines). - bat it's a useless cat. Cat concatenates files. ANSI colour breaks that. - alias ls='ls -Fh' , problem solved. Now you have * for executables, / for directories and so on. - ncdu it's fine, perfect for what it does - iomenu it's much faster than fzf and it almost…

> bat it's a useless cat I can't see bat as a "useless cat" or a replacement for cat except for reading source code in the terminal. It's more a like a less with syntax highlight or a read-only vim.

I agree with this. cat is great for "cating" bat is great for throwing shit on the terminal in a fashion that makes it semantically easier to reason with, two different use cases.

Re: Modern Linux tools

#33

Post by MontyCarloHall »

ed_blackburn wrote: post #30

I’m on a Mac, and some of the default tooling feels dated: GNU coreutils and friends are often stuck around mid-2000s versions. Rather than replace or fight against the system tools, I supplement them with a few extras. Honestly, most are marginal upgrades over what macOS ships with, except for fzf, which is a huge productivity boost. Fuzzy-finding through my shell history or using interactive autocompletion makes a…

>some of the default tooling feels dated: GNU coreutils and friends are often stuck around mid-2000s versions

That’s because they’re not GNU coreutils, they’re BSD coreutils, which are spartan by design. (FWIW, this is one of my theories for why Linux/GNU dominated BSD: the default user experience of the former is just so much richer, even though the system architecture of the latter is arguably superior.)

Re: Modern Linux tools

#34

Post by abenga »

arccy wrote: post #5
_ZeD_ wrote: post #2

the second item is exa modern replacement for ls/tree, not maintained "not maintained" doesn't smell "modern" to me...

like good open source, it's now forked by a community instead of having only a single maintainer eza: https://github.com/eza-community/eza

The README has an ad at the top.

Yeeeah, nope.

Re: Modern Linux tools

#35

Post by kokada »

0x37 wrote: post #9

These may be objectively superior (I haven't tested), but I have come to realize (like so many others) that if you ever change your OS installation, set up VMs, or SSH anywhere, preferring these is just an uphill battle that never ends. I don't want to have to set these up in every new environment I operate in, or even use a mix of these on my personal computer and the traditional ones elsewhere. Learn the classic to…

One of the reasons I really like Nix, my setup works basically everywhere (as long the host OS is either Linux or macOS, but those are the only 2 environments that I care). I don't even need root access to install Nix since there are multiple ways to install Nix rootless.

But yes, in the eventual case that I don't have Nix I can very much use the classic tools. It is not a binary choice, you can have both.

Re: Modern Linux tools

#36

Post by drob518 »

bieganski wrote: post #3

i wish there was an additional column in the table, that says "what problem does it solve". oh, and 'it's written in rust' does not count.

“It’s written in Rust”

Actual LOL. Indeed. I was working for a large corporation at one point and a development team was explaining their product. I asked what its differentiators were versus our competitors. The team replied that ours was written in Go. #faceplam

Re: Modern Linux tools

#37

Post by GuB-42 »

0x37 wrote: post #9

These may be objectively superior (I haven't tested), but I have come to realize (like so many others) that if you ever change your OS installation, set up VMs, or SSH anywhere, preferring these is just an uphill battle that never ends. I don't want to have to set these up in every new environment I operate in, or even use a mix of these on my personal computer and the traditional ones elsewhere. Learn the classic to…

I have some of these tools, they are not "objectively superior". A lot of them make things prettier with colors, bargraphs, etc... It is nice on a well-configured terminal, not so much in a pipeline. Some of them are full TUIs, essentially graphical tools that run in a terminal rather than traditional command line tools.

Some of them are smart but sometimes I want dumb, for example, ripgrep respects gitignore, and often, I don't want that. Though in this case, there is an option to turn it off (-uuu). That's a common theme with these tools too, they are trying to be smart by default and you need option to make them dumb.

So no, these tools are not "objectively superior", they are generally more advanced, but it is not always what you need. They complement classic tools, but in no way replace them.

Re: Modern Linux tools

#38

Post by kombine »

0x37 wrote: post #9

These may be objectively superior (I haven't tested), but I have come to realize (like so many others) that if you ever change your OS installation, set up VMs, or SSH anywhere, preferring these is just an uphill battle that never ends. I don't want to have to set these up in every new environment I operate in, or even use a mix of these on my personal computer and the traditional ones elsewhere. Learn the classic to…

I started a new job and spent maybe a day setting up the tools and dotfiles on my development machine in the cloud. I'm going to keep it throughout my employment so it's worth the investment. And I install most of the tools via nix package manager so I don't have to compile things or figure out how to install them on a particular Linux distribution. L

Re: Modern Linux tools

#39

Post by imcritic »

andai wrote: post #10
0x37 wrote: post #9

These may be objectively superior (I haven't tested), but I have come to realize (like so many others) that if you ever change your OS installation, set up VMs, or SSH anywhere, preferring these is just an uphill battle that never ends. I don't want to have to set these up in every new environment I operate in, or even use a mix of these on my personal computer and the traditional ones elsewhere. Learn the classic to…

I wanted to say we should just stick with what Unix shipped forever. But doesn't GNU already violate that idea?

IMO this is very stupid: don't let past dictate future. UNIX is history. History is for historians, it should not be the basis that shapes the environment for engineers living in present.
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