2024-06-06

Neonix


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I've found ripgrep to be an invaluable tool. At some level it's just grep, but its speed and ergonomics make it something else. I find things much more quickly. In combination with projectile, it gives me a fast project-wide find, reducing one of the advantages of commercial IDEs over my humble emacs.

Today, Bill Mill points me to a command line tool called fzf which looks like kind of a command-line Swiss army knife. It certainly makes sorting through very long find . output a breeze.

Some of Bill's scripts use a find replacement called fd, which I plan to take a look at.

I think this is an interesting trend, taking venerable UNIX command-line tools and rethinking, reimplementing them with modern languages and the decades of experience since that first, revolutioary, burst of command-line creativity in the early UNIX days.

I'll let this post become a "sprout" from which I can track these kinds of tools as I encounter them.

  • fd
    A modern retake on find I haven't played with yet.

  • fzf
    A fuzzy-matching tool for interactively sorting through large command line and command completion outputs. See Bill Mill.

  • rg
    "ripgrep". A new take on grep, super fast, seachers directories recursively, by default excluding .git and whatever is .gitignore-d.

I'll add more as I, um, fd them!


p.s. apparently there's a DJ called Neonix! Sorry! I'm using the, er, neologism to refer to neo-UNIX.