It's always a dilemma: add these tools and become more productive or stick to the standard ones because you could be on a machine that only has the "standard" ones (base distro or even just POSIX).

I finally decided that having the "better" (for me) tools was the better way to go; now that it's more common to deploy on "cattle" it's not so hard to look for accidental dependencies.

I have created aliases to the new tools, so I get to use the new tool and most flags are the same.

I created this small list of alternative Unix commands that do something better than existing tools. Many of these (ripgrep, fzf) have gotten very popular recently. Let me know if you know of any others that I missed!

Curlie[1], as more feature complete and faster alternative to httpie.

[1]: https://curlie.io

Thanks! This is super helpful! I knew about and use exa and fzf but the others are new to me.

My two favorite tools: lsd, a fast alternative to exa https://github.com/Peltoche/lsd mcfly, reverse-search on steroids https://github.com/cantino/mcfly

> McFly's suggestions are prioritized in real time with a small neural network.

Very interesting, at least the first command line tool I've seen that does this. I wonder how it compares to just fzf.

I haven't heard of McFly, it looks really awesome, I'll definitely add it! I'm also curious, why do you like lsd over exa?

I've used exa in the past but lsd is more focused (basically a drop in replacement for ls) and a lot faster.

Instead of curl or even httpie, I use xh[0]. It builds on a lot of the same features as httpie, but is faster and offers a --curl flag to translate into a curl command that you can share with colleagues.

[0]: https://github.com/ducaale/xh

What was that tool that would print JSON as a list of greppable declarations? I forgot the name but I liked it a lot more than jq back in the day.

You're probably thinking of https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron.

This is it.

Didn't know about `xh` and `curlie`, thanks!

(Apparently `xh` replaces `ht` because its repo redirects to `xh`.)