As someone who logs into hundreds of servers in various networks, from various customers/clients, there is so little value in using custom tooling, as they will not be available on 90% of the systems. I have a very limited set of additional tools I tend to install on systems, and they are in my default ansible-config, so will end up on systems quickly, but I try to keep this list short and sweet. 95% of the systems I…
"servers" is the key word here. Some of the tools listed on that page are just slightly "improved" versions of common sysadmin utilities, and indeed, those are probably not worth it. But some are really development tools, things that you'd install on the small number of machines where you do programming. Those might be. The ones that leap out at me are ripgrep (a genuinely excellent recursive grepper), jq (a JSON pro…
Modern Linux tools
141–150 of 219 posts
Re: Modern Linux tools
#142I basically live in the terminal. However, every single one of these tools offers a solution to a problem that I don't have; aren't installed on my system; and mysteriously have many tens of thousands of github stars. I genuinely don't know what is going on here.
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Re: Modern Linux tools
#143These 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 know well enough my way around vi, because although XEmacs was my editor during the 1990's when working on UNIX systems, when visiting customers there was a very high probability that they only had ed and vi installed on their server systems. Many folks nowadays don't get how lucky they are, not having to do UNIX development on a time-sharing system, although cloud systems kind of replicate the experience.
Ed is the standard text editor.
Re: Modern Linux tools
#144As someone who logs into hundreds of servers in various networks, from various customers/clients, there is so little value in using custom tooling, as they will not be available on 90% of the systems. I have a very limited set of additional tools I tend to install on systems, and they are in my default ansible-config, so will end up on systems quickly, but I try to keep this list short and sweet. 95% of the systems I…
Is there any tool or ssh extension that would bring these apps into the remote session?
Is something like that possible? Seems like you could conceivablely dump these small file size tools into a temp folder and and use them and that could be automated.
Is there a security issue with that? Do any of these tools need more permission than the remote session would have?
Maybe the main issue is portability of these apps?
This is certainly a common sentiment (I've felt it myself) so is it at all possible?
Re: Modern Linux tools
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
For my part, the day I was confused why "grep" couldn't find some files that were obviously there, only to realize that "ripgrep" is ignoring files in the gitignore, that was the day I removed "ripgrep" of my system. I never asked for such behaviour, and I have no time for pretty "modern" opinions in a base software. Often, when I read "modern", I read "immature". I am not ready to replace my stable base utilities fo…
Sounds like the problem you have here is that `grep` is aliased to `ripgrep`. ripgrep isn't intended to be a drop-in replacement for POSIX grep, and the subjectively easier usage of ripgrep can never replace grep's matureness and adoption. Note: if you want to make ripgrep not do .gitignore filtering, set `RIPGREP_CONFIG_PATH` to point to a config file that contains `-uu`. Sources: - https://github.com/BurntSushi/rip…
So I stand corrected. I did indeed use ripgrep as a drop-in replacement.
That's on me!
Re: Modern Linux tools
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Rust rewrites can become tiresome, they have become a meme at this point, but there are really good tools there too. An example from my personal experience: I used to think that oxipng was just a faster optipng. I took a closer look recently and saw that it is more than that. See: https://op111.net/posts/2025/09/png-compression-oxipng-optip...
If a new tool has actual performance or feature advantages, then that's the answer to "what problem does it solve", regardless of what language it's in.
Bingo.
Re: Modern Linux tools
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, how would you recursively grep files ignoring (hidden files [e.g., `.git`]), only matching a certain file extension? (E.g., `rg -g '*.foo' bar`.) I use the command line a lot too and this is one of my most common commands, and I don't know of an elegant way to do it with the builtin Unix tools. (And I have basically the same question for finding files matching a regex or glob [ignoring the stuff I o…
alias grep='grep --exclude-dir .\* --exclude .\*' grep -r --include \*.foo bar
Just noting why I answered why don't do this (and honestly do think it's a very good idea) here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45569313
Re: Modern Linux tools
#148These 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…
Not a comment on these particular tools, but I keep non-standard utilities that I use in my ~/bin/ directory, and they go with me when I move to a different system. The tools mentioned here could be handled the same way, making the uphill a little less steep.
Re: Modern Linux tools
#149I basically live in the terminal. However, every single one of these tools offers a solution to a problem that I don't have; aren't installed on my system; and mysteriously have many tens of thousands of github stars. I genuinely don't know what is going on here.
What do you do in the terminal all day that does not leave you with the desire to improve your toolset? Do you write all your own tools?
Re: Modern Linux tools
#150As someone who logs into hundreds of servers in various networks, from various customers/clients, there is so little value in using custom tooling, as they will not be available on 90% of the systems. I have a very limited set of additional tools I tend to install on systems, and they are in my default ansible-config, so will end up on systems quickly, but I try to keep this list short and sweet. 95% of the systems I…
What's the relevance of these "as someone who ..." posts? Nobody cares that these tools don't happen to fit into your carefully curated list of tools that you install on remote computers. You can install these on your local computer to reap some benefits.
It's the bean soup theory ("what if I don't like beans") in action.