Modern CLI tools — a survey of the new defaults

For most of the 2010s the canonical Unix toolkit stayed stable: grep, find, cat, ls, du. Around 2020 that began to shift, as faster reimplementations in Rust and Go — most with sensible defaults, color output, and better UX — started displacing the originals one terminal at a time. By 2026 a different default toolkit has quietly taken over the dotfiles of working programmers: ripgrep in place of grep, fd in place of find, bat in place of cat, eza in place of ls, dust in place of du, jq and friends for structured data. This page maps the new defaults. The selection criterion is opinionated: each tool listed is either strictly better than the original at its job, or a meaningful expansion of what the job could be. One deliberate omission: the entire shell layer (fish, nushell, oils) is excluded — those deserve their own page and would muddy this one's focus on point tools that drop cleanly into any shell.

An opinionated map of the Rust/Go-era CLI tools that have quietly replaced the Unix defaults.

File search & navigation

  • fd
    find replacement with smart defaults: regex by default, color output, parallel walks, respects .gitignore unless asked. Memorable enough syntax that you don't reread the man page every time.
    webpage
  • eza
    Maintained ls replacement (forked from exa). Colorized, git-aware, tree mode built in. The 'I aliased ls=eza years ago' default.
    webpage
  • broot
    Interactive directory tree with fuzzy search. Faster than tree+find for the question 'where in this repo is the file that mentions X.'
    webpage
  • zoxide
    A smarter cd that learns your frequently-visited directories. After a week of use you'll forget the autojump generation existed.
    webpage
  • dust
    du replacement that visualizes disk usage as a tree with bars. The right tool for the 'what's eating my disk' question, which is basically the only time you reach for du.
    webpage

Text & data wrangling

  • ripgrep (rg)
    The grep replacement. Faster, respects .gitignore by default, Unicode-aware out of the box. The single most-installed Rust tool on developer machines.
    webpage
  • jq
    Still the canonical answer for slicing JSON on the command line. Worth re-learning every few years as a refresher; the language is small and the leverage is enormous.
    webpage
  • miller (mlr)
    jq for CSV/TSV/JSON-Lines. Reads tabular data, runs SQL-like transformations, outputs the format you want. Cuts down a lot of one-off Python scripts.
    webpage
  • ast-grep
    Structural search via syntax trees, not regex. The right tool when you're refactoring across a codebase and 'find every call to X with N arguments' is a real query you need to write.
    webpage
  • delta
    A pager for git diff with syntax highlighting and proper side-by-side mode. Configure once in ~/.gitconfig and every diff command from then on is readable.
    webpage

Terminal upgrades

  • Starship
    Cross-shell prompt with sensible defaults. Faster than the powerline-style alternatives because it's a single Rust binary, not a Python script invoked on every prompt.
    webpage
  • fzf
    Fuzzy finder that wires into shells, vim, tmux, git, and a dozen other tools. Ctrl-R for shell history alone justifies the install.
    webpage
  • Atuin
    Replaces shell history with a SQLite-backed, syncable, context-aware version. The combination of 'where was I when I ran this' plus full-text search is genuinely worth the migration.
    webpage
  • Zellij
    A terminal multiplexer with sensible keybindings out of the box, layouts you can describe in config, and the UX polish tmux never got around to.
    webpage
  • btop
    htop's modern sibling. Higher information density, better colors, GPU + network sections; the right thing to look at when something on your machine is misbehaving and you don't yet know what.
    webpage

Thinkers & further reading

  • Modern Unix list
    A curated GitHub list of modern alternatives to common Unix commands. The closest thing to a canonical reference for this space; use it as a quarterly sanity check on what's new.
    webpage
  • Julia Evans
    To understand how the underlying Unix tools actually work, read everything by Julia Evans. Her zines and blog posts are the canonical pedagogical resource for command-line literacy.
    webpage
  • Andrew Gallant (BurntSushi)
    The author of ripgrep and several other tools on this list. His blog posts on ripgrep's design and Unicode handling are the best long-form writing in the space.
    webpage
  • Brendan Gregg
    The systems-performance bible. When CLI tools feel slow, his methodology and flame graphs are how you find out why.
    webpage
  • Julia Evans — 'How to be a wizard programmer' (Strange Loop)
    Strange Loop talk on debugging your way to understanding any program. Sets the mental model for using the CLI tools above as investigation instruments rather than rituals.
    video