EDIT: Added a companion video https://youtu.be/fU8HB1cvG9w

Awesome tools that I learned about from the comments:

  • clipboard (not sure how I functioned without it, it’s a bit like vim registers but in the terminal)
  • fzf-tab
  • atuin

I’ve compiled a list of 10 CLI tools that I use the most and which impacted my terminal-based workflow significantly:

https://piotrzan.medium.com/10-cli-tools-that-made-the-biggest-impact-f8a2f4168434

Here is tl;dr:

  • fzf: A fuzzy finder that enhances command-line workflows with interactive searching.
  • bpytop: Resource monitor that shows usage and stats for processor, memory, disks, network and processes.
  • tmux: A terminal multiplexer for managing multiple terminal sessions efficiently.
  • lazygit: A TUI for git operations, simplifying repository management.
  • gh (GitHub CLI): A GitHub CLI tool to manage repositories, issues, and PRs from the terminal.
  • entr: A utility that runs commands when files change, useful for automation.
  • just: A command runner for managing project-specific tasks with simple commands.
  • taskwarrior: A command-line tool for efficient task management.
  • tldr: Simplified man pages providing quick command examples.
  • pet: A snippet manager for saving and reusing complex command-line commands.

It wasn’t easy to choose, for example I skipped Autokey which is really amazing and I built nice workflow around it. What are yours?

Comments

yasser_kaddoura · 2024-08-11 · 31 points

denisidoro/navi: An interactive cheatsheet tool for the command-line is superior to knqyf263/pet: Simple command-line snippet manager.

Regarding fzf, Aloxaf/fzf-tab: Replace zsh’s default completion selection menu with fzf! is a life changer if you integrate it properly with commands & if you have a script to preview any file type.

For those who are interested for more CLI/TUI tools, there are awesome lists out there, such as:

HelpImOutside · 2024-08-11 · 6 points

Navi looks super cool but in my experience this type of thing is something I install then completely forget about. I’m sure once you’ve used it for a while it’s invaluable but..

yasser_kaddoura · 2024-08-11 · 2 points

I use it for 2 situations:

When I find myself googling something for a command that I don’t use often, and an alias isn’t convenient to remember. Let’s say you want to use a tool without sourcing config, and you find yourself googling it. In navi you can simple add something like the following configuration, you can find it easily by presssing C-g and type “vim without”. This is faster than googling and easier to find than an alias.

# Run vim without rc vim -u NONE

Accelerating writing a command by using variables, for instance include files as arguments for a command

# Downgrade pkg sudo pacman -U $pkg: ls /var/cache/pacman/pkg/\*zst

I don’t use navi heavily, since most commands I execute I use C-r with fzf which shows the commands that I usually use.

piotr1215 · 2024-08-11 · 5 points

Thank you for sharing! fzf-tab is really cool, added it to my plugins. Navi looks great at first glance, but I have extensive solleciton of commmands in pet and it works well for me, so no reason to swap.

[deleted] · 2024-08-11 · 0 points

Totally agree, I went the same route and have now lots of various scripts that integrate with zsh and work for me.

piotr1215 · 2024-08-11 · 3 points

Totally agree, I went the same route and have now lots of various scripts that integrate with zsh and work for me.

[deleted] · 2024-08-11 · 0 points

Thank you, I’ve browsed it and there are a few gems. Maybe I will start using clipboard again, it has some bugs before but this is a neat tool.

piotr1215 · 2024-08-11 · 2 points

Thank you, I’ve browsed it and there are a few gems. Maybe I will start using clipboard again, it has some bugs before but this is a neat tool.

ratthing · 2024-08-11 · 8 points

I use a great knowledge base tool called nb (https://xwmx.github.io/nb/). It is a massive Bash script that uses Git as the backend for managing notes, files, bookmarks, and todos. Its a little clunky at first, but once you get the hang of it, it is very useful.

Innovator-X · 2026-04-27 · 1 points

wow the creator of the repo is a legend. Their work output is insane.

freefallfreddy · 2024-08-11 · 6 points

I’ve switched from entr to watchexec.

piotr1215 · 2024-08-11 · 5 points

I actually switched from watchexed to entr haha

jstanforth · 2024-08-11 · 1 points

Just curious, what are the benefits of one vs the other?

freefallfreddy · 2024-08-11 · 4 points

For me: it’s easier to select files to watch. With entr you have to use ls or find to select files, then pipe those to entr. With watchexec you can pass in extensions, regexes (I think) and it recurses into subdirectories to find matching files to watch.

jstanforth · 2024-08-11 · 2 points

Ahh, nice, thanks! Super-useful already after a couple minutes of experimenting with it.

freefallfreddy · 2024-08-11 · 6 points

Also: lazydocker, such a quality of life thing. Especially when I want to quickly shell into containers or restart them.

piotr1215 · 2024-08-11 · 1 points

Great recommendation, I keep forgetting to use it haha. Always fumbling with docker commands instead or use pet snippets.

foomojive · 2024-08-12 · 1 points

I use ctop

freefallfreddy · 2024-08-12 · 1 points

Cool. Looks like their feature sets don’t overlap so much though.

foomojive · 2024-08-12 · 1 points

Well ctop can quickly exec a shell for a single container, view logs, start and stop, etc.

freefallfreddy · 2024-08-12 · 1 points

I don’t see start/stop in their README.

foomojive · 2024-08-12 · 2 points

Mm, ok. I am not a contributor to the project, I just use it. Press enter over a container for a context menu where you can log, start, stop, pause, unpause, and I think remove a container. Don’t know why this is not in the readme.

Anyway to each their own, if you like lazydocker go for it

theunglichdaide · 2024-08-11 · 6 points

Not a CLI, but I found this website very useful https://terminaltrove.com/
I discovered many cool CLI tools through it.

[deleted] · 2024-08-11 · 0 points

Thank you for the recommendations, both Atuin and glances looks really cool. Last week I’ve been thinking about creating a project for sharing command line history, looks like atuin does exactly what I thought about!

piotr1215 · 2024-08-12 · 1 points

Thank you for the recommendations, both Atuin and glances looks really cool. Last week I’ve been thinking about creating a project for sharing command line history, looks like atuin does exactly what I thought about!

[deleted] · 2024-08-12 · 0 points

Even without the sync, having history for tmux session and folder separately is relaly cool!

piotr1215 · 2024-08-12 · 2 points

Even without the sync, having history for tmux session and folder separately is relaly cool!

gumnos · 2024-08-11 · 9 points

Of those, I find tmux indispensable, and entr & fzf are my go-tos when I have the need for their respective functionalities (though it’s not terribly frequent). I’ve used taskwarrior, but found that it was overkill for most of what I do—when I have time-based tasks, I put them on my remind(1) calendar, and otherwise-unbounded tasks just go in a todo file (which is linked to my ~/.plan so I can use finger from a remote machine to get my task-list).

I am comfortable enough with git that I don’t really need lazygit, and I don’t use GitHub enough to warrant using gh.

I didn’t find that tldr gave me anything I couldn’t largely get from either apropos or man, so it never stuck.

I tend to use top(1) or systat(1) for my resource monitoring, so don’t really find myself reaching for the fancier versions of top like htop or bpytop

But I hadn’t heard of just or pet. I suspect this old-fart would use make(1) where you’re using just. But pet looks pretty slick.

Thanks for sharing!

piotr1215 · 2024-08-11 · 1 points

As a fellow old fart who used Makefile most of the time, just is really slick if you want to give it a try!

belibebond · 2024-08-12 · 1 points

It’s actively managed and features are added frequently. It’s cross platform and works with cicd. Really an excellent tool. Give just a try.

AmazingDisplay8 · 2024-08-11 · 4 points

Thanks for pet. I didn’t know it existed. Good list

dfwtjms · 2024-08-11 · 4 points

Isn’t that just aliases and functions with extra steps and dependencies?

pouetpouetcamion2 · 2024-08-11 · 4 points

no a tool, but bash 3 boilerplate from kevin van zonneveld (i mean “main.sh”) https://github.com/kvz/bash3boilerplate.git brings good template for argparsing, err logging on term (no systemd or ) and trapping. this and shellcheck enables you to write a few scripts quickly. they complete well with listed tools.

mgutz · 2024-08-12 · 3 points

  • lazydocker
  • ripgrep
  • neovim
  • yazi - file manager
  • fd - find
  • dua - fast disk usage (can be interactive)
  • glances - system resource overview

piotr1215 · 2024-08-12 · 1 points

You are second person recommending glances, it slooks really neat.

thesobercoder · 2024-08-11 · 5 points

You might want to try bottom, which I suspect might be faster than bpytop because it is written in rust.

ludicroussavageofmau · 2024-08-11 · 12 points

If you want a similar look and feel to bpytop but with good performance, try btop++. It’s by the same author and is the successor to bpytop (has been since 2021).

RoboticElfJedi · 2024-08-11 · 6 points

I never tire of these posts, I usually find something new.

I looked into lazygit recently. It looked like it hadn’t been under development for years - I couldn’t get it to install, as it won’t work on python 3.7+.

piotr1215 · 2024-08-11 · 1 points

Thanks! I just checked and last commit was 2 days ago, the repo looks pretty active.

RoboticElfJedi · 2024-08-11 · 2 points

I was wrong - perhaps I got it confused. Playing with it now!

Big_Combination9890 · 2024-08-11 · 2 points

I didn’t know about bpytop, and now I do! Thanks so much, I was on the lookout for a complete sysmon for my setup!

Btw. as far as interface design goes, that thing should be a textbook example for terminal user-discoverability done right.

ITooSpooky · 2024-08-12 · 2 points

Instead of using bpytop use btop++ which is a rewrite by the same author using c++, bpytop has been discontinued since 2021

Big_Combination9890 · 2024-08-12 · 1 points

Oh, thank you, I thought the project could need some updates!

dhaitz · 2024-08-12 · 2 points

Here’s a useful list of modern shell commands: johnalanwoods/maintained-modern-unix

Tools like fd, bat, lsd etc. are faster, prettier and more convenient (e.g. with git integration) than their traditional counterparts

yuri0r · 2024-08-13 · 2 points

i went from tmux to zellij, layouts are cool, starts from 1 by default.
gitui, does almost everything i need in regards to git.
atuin, holy fuck its great.

rd_626 · 2024-08-11 · 1 points

RemindMe! 1 month

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bew78 · 2025-04-05 · 1 points

Nix ✨

qiang_shi · 2025-10-28 · 1 points

hard pass.

SUPER complex

only navel gazers with apparently infinitely zero value free time use nix

Status_Tea_2017 · 2025-06-04 · 1 points

llm the cli by Simon Willison is a pretty magical IMO and is on my top 10 list.

Simple_Paper_4526 · 2025-09-01 · 1 points

fzf, ripgrep, bat, jq, exa, htop, tldr, lazygit, entr, and fd. lately i’d add Qodo cli too since it plugs in ai review/gen without leaving terminal.

qiang_shi · 2025-10-28 · 1 points

throw away all your ai cli tools and look at sst/opencode

thank me later

iluvecommerce · 2026-02-05 · 1 points

Great list! These traditional CLI tools are essential for any developer’s toolkit.

As someone who’s been building CLI tools, I created Sweet! CLI (https://sweetcli.com) to tackle a different problem: AI-powered automation. Instead of remembering complex commands, you describe what you need in natural language and it writes/executes the scripts automatically. It’s like having fzf for your entire workflow - describe what you want and it finds the right implementation.

What makes it different is it actually executes the code it generates (with safety checks), making it perfect for one-off automation tasks that you’d normally write throwaway scripts for. It complements tools like just and entr beautifully.

(I’m the founder, building it as a solo developer to solve my own repetitive scripting problems!)

What kind of repetitive tasks do you find yourself scripting most often?

Noundry · 2026-03-10 · 1 points

Solid list. You might also want to check out Worktale, a CLI tool that turns your git history into a private, interactive developer journal and dashboard. Everything stays local, so it’s handy for tracking your code activity and prepping work summaries without sending data anywhere.

Noundry · 2026-03-11 · 1 points

Solid list. You might also want to check out Worktale, a CLI tool that turns your git history into a private, interactive developer journal and dashboard. Everything stays local, so it’s handy for tracking your code activity and prepping work summaries without sending data anywhere.

ahk-_- · 2024-08-11 · 0 points

Emacs.

bagpussnz9 · 2024-08-11 · 3 points

there it is :-)

[deleted] · 2024-08-11 · 5 points

Nice one, chest also allows for creating custom chest sheets.

piotr1215 · 2024-08-11 · 1 points

Nice one, chest also allows for creating custom chest sheets.