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Modern Linux tools

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Re: Modern Linux tools

#91

Post by chimprich »

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 tend to use some of these "modern" tools if they are a drop-in replacement for existing tools.

E.g. I have ls set up aliased to eza as part of my custom set of configuration scripts. eza pretty much works as ls in most scenarios.

If I'm in an environment which I control and is all configured as I like it, then I get a shinier ls with some nice defaults.

If I'm in another environment then ls still works without any extra thought, and the muscle memory is the same, and I haven't lost anything.

If there's a tool which works very differently to the standard suite, then it really has to be pulling its weight before I consider using it.

Re: Modern Linux tools

#92

Post by antegamisou »

Otek wrote: post #4

This is 2023 article. As with most “modern tools” half of them probably already have some newer, shinier and more trendy replacements

I find the opposite to be true. Most of these are really just reinventing the wheel of foundational GNU tools that are really powerful provided one has spent some time on them.

Re: Modern Linux tools

#93

Post by twic »

sigio wrote: post #68

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 processor - there is no alternative to this in the standard unix toolkit), and hyperfine (benchmarking).

Re: Modern Linux tools

#94

Post by twic »

fergie wrote: post #14

I 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.

How would you filter and transform a large JSON file, without jq?

Re: Modern Linux tools

#95

Post by thiht »

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…

That goes against the UNIX philosophy IMO. Tools doing "one thing and doing it well" also means that tools can and should be replaced when a superior alternative emerges. That's pretty much the whole point of simple utilities. I agree that you should learn the classic tools first as it's a huge investment for a whole career, but you absolutely should learn newer alternatives too. I don't care much for bat or eza, but some alternatives like fd (find alt) or sd (sed alt) are absolute time savers.

Re: Modern Linux tools

#97

Post by anthk »

ed_blackburn wrote: post #32
lucasoshiro wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There's ccze which colorizes stuff without creating a supposed cat(1) replacement.

Re: Modern Linux tools

#98

Post by anthk »

account42 wrote: post #52
fergie wrote: post #14

I 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.

They tend to be popular with the "rewrite it in rust/go" crowd as far as I can tell. Or in other words, you are no longer part of the cool kids.

I've seen an online radio player in Go which was unusabiily slow on my Atom n270 due to the badly coded ANSI audio visualization FX' using floating math. Meanwhile a with Cava or another visualizer and mpd+mpc I could do the same using 200x less resources.

Re: Modern Linux tools

#99

Post by 63stack »

sigio wrote: post #68

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…

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.

Re: Modern Linux tools

#100

Post by eulers_secret »

twic wrote: post #94
fergie wrote: post #14

I 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.

How would you filter and transform a large JSON file, without jq?

Many of us just don't use JSON in our day jobs, weird I know, but true.

The only thing I use JQ for at work is parsing the copilot API response so I remember what the model names are - that's it! TBH, I could just skip it and read the json

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