Modern CLI Tools: Seven Unix Replacements

ls and grep have been on the job since the early 1970s, and it shows — not in reliability, which is beyond reproach, but in defaults designed for teletypes and terminals eighty columns wide. Over the last decade a small army of rewrites has asked a fair question: what if the classics had colours, respected your .gitignore, and didn’t require a man page for basic use?

Here are the seven replacements actually worth your muscle memory. All free, all open source, all single self-contained binaries, and — with one exception — written in Rust, because of course they are.

The short version

Instead of	Try	What you get
ls	eza	Colours, icons, git status, tree view
cat	bat	Syntax highlighting, line numbers, git markers
grep	ripgrep	Speed, and it skips everything you ignore
find	fd	A syntax a human can remember
cd	zoxide	Jump to directories by name fragment
git diff pager	delta	Diffs you can actually read
(everything)	fzf	Fuzzy-find files, history, anything

Two of them at work: the eza tree command from below with --icons=auto, then git diff through the delta config from below, on one uncommitted change. · eza 0.23.5, delta 0.19.2 in Ghostty 1.3.1

eza

Replaces: ls

exa was the original “modern ls” until development stalled; eza is the community fork that carried on, because no Rust binary is ever truly allowed to die. It does what ls does, then keeps going: colours that mean something, icons, a per-file git status column, and a tree view for when you want the shape of a directory rather than its contents.

eza -l --git --icons=auto
eza --tree --level=2

Install: brew install eza · sudo dnf install eza · sudo apt install eza on recent Ubuntu and Debian (older LTS releases: prebuilt binaries on GitHub).

Catch: your distro’s LTS repos may not have it yet, and the icons need a Nerd Font in your terminal — the same one your Starship prompt already wants. Write --icons=auto rather than a bare --icons, too: the flag takes an optional value, so left to its own devices it will swallow whatever comes next and complain that src/ is not a valid value for it.

bat

Replaces: cat

“A cat clone with wings”, by its own description, and who are we to argue. bat adds syntax highlighting for a couple of hundred languages, line numbers, git change markers in the gutter, and automatic paging for long files.

bat src/main.rs

The detail that makes it alias-safe: when its output is piped, bat drops the decorations and behaves exactly like cat, so cat file | something keeps working even if cat is bat.

Install: brew install bat · sudo apt install bat · sudo dnf install bat.

Catch: Debian and Ubuntu call the binary batcat (a package name clash, long story). One alias fixes it: alias bat=batcat.

ripgrep

Replaces: grep

ripgrep (rg) searches recursively by default, respects your .gitignore, skips hidden files and binaries, searches in parallel, and is fast enough that your reading speed becomes the bottleneck. It began life as a showpiece for Rust’s regex engine and ended up in everyone’s toolbox by being simply, embarrassingly better.

rg "TODO"              # everywhere, respecting .gitignore
rg "fn main" -t rust   # Rust files only
rg "secret" -uu        # include hidden and ignored files

Install: brew install ripgrep · sudo apt install ripgrep · sudo dnf install ripgrep.

Catch: it is not POSIX grep — the flags differ, and not always harmlessly. Recursion is the default, and -r has been reassigned to --replace, which takes an argument and will quietly make off with your search pattern. You’ll still want real grep in your fingers for other people’s servers. The full ripgrep guide covers the rest of the flags, and exactly which files it’s skipping when a search comes back empty.

fd

Replaces: find

find is powerful in the way a tax code is powerful, and its syntax was clearly designed by someone who has never met a human. fd keeps the power and bins the incantation: the pattern is a regex, the search starts at the current directory, and .gitignore is respected here too.

fd readme              # anything matching "readme", below here
fd -e md               # by extension
fd -t f -x wc -l       # run a command on every result

The -t f there is worth the two characters: without it, fd hands directories to your command too, and wc has opinions about being asked to read one.

Compare find . -iname "*readme*", which you had to look up just now. Again.

Install: brew install fd · sudo apt install fd-find · sudo dnf install fd-find.

Catch: Debian and Ubuntu strike again — the binary there is fdfind. Same alias trick applies.

zoxide

Replaces: cd (mostly)

zoxide watches which directories you visit, then lets you jump to them by fragment: z doc takes you to your most “frecent” — frequent plus recent, a portmanteau only a tool this useful gets away with — match. zi opens an interactive picker powered by fzf. After a week it knows your habits better than you do.

It needs one line in your shell config to hook in:

~/.zshrc

eval "$(zoxide init zsh)"

Install: brew install zoxide · sudo apt install zoxide · sudo dnf install zoxide.

Catch: it only knows where you’ve been since installation, so the first few days feel unremarkable. Persist. Plain cd keeps working alongside it, and if you’re fully converted, zoxide init --cmd cd zsh will take over the cd command itself.

fzf

Replaces: nothing, and half of everything

fzf is less a tool than a universal solvent for lists: pipe any list into it and you get a fuzzy, type-to-filter picker. Its shell integration is where it earns the spot here — Ctrl+R becomes a full-screen fuzzy history search, Ctrl+T inserts a fuzzy-picked file path into your command line, and Alt+C fuzzy-changes directory.

# ~/.zshrc — shell integration (fzf 0.48 and later)
eval "$(fzf --zsh)"

vim $(fzf)             # the party trick that sells it

If Ctrl+R was the one shortcut you took from our keyboard shortcuts cheat sheet, this is that keystroke graduating from party trick to superpower. The one exception to the Rust theme, incidentally — fzf is Go.

Install: brew install fzf · sudo apt install fzf · sudo dnf install fzf.

Catch: the fzf --zsh integration flag needs version 0.48 or newer; older distro packages ship a key-bindings.zsh file to source instead. Check with fzf --version.

Full guide: fzf: fuzzy finding anything on the command line — the search operators that turn guessing into aiming, preview windows, defaults worth setting once, and the recipes worth stealing.

delta

Replaces: git’s default pager

git diff output has historically been formatted for computers that enjoy punishment. delta gives it syntax highlighting, line numbers, and n / N to jump between changed files, with optional side-by-side view for wide terminals. It’s a pager, not a replacement for git itself — configure once and every git diff, git show and git log -p improves silently.

~/.gitconfig

[core]
  pager = delta

[interactive]
  diffFilter = delta --color-only

[delta]
  navigate = true

[merge]
  conflictstyle = zdiff3

Add side-by-side = true under [delta] if your terminal has the width for it. The conflictstyle line isn’t delta’s at all — it’s git’s, and one of the git settings worth stealing along with the reason it’s there.

Install: brew install git-delta · sudo dnf install git-delta · elsewhere, binaries on GitHub.

Catch: if you already do all your diffing in a GUI tool, this changes nothing about your life. For everyone else it’s the highest ratio of effort to improvement on this page.

Should you alias the originals?

Partly. Aliases only apply to interactive shells — scripts never see them, so nothing breaks there — and both bat and eza detect pipes and behave themselves. These are safe:

~/.zshrc

alias ls='eza --icons=auto'
alias ll='eza -l --git --icons=auto'
alias cat='bat'

But don’t alias grep to rg or find to fd: the flags differ, sometimes silently, and one day you’ll paste a command expecting POSIX behaviour and get a confusing error instead. Type the new names until they stick. And keep the classics in your repertoire regardless — these tools make your machines nicer; they don’t excuse you from knowing grep on somebody else’s.

Tip

Everything on this page is a single self-contained binary with no daemon, no account and no telemetry. Uninstalling is deleting one file and a line from your shell config — so try freely, and keep only what earns its place.

Honourable mentions

• dust — du with a bar chart and a sense of proportion
• duf — df, but readable
• btop — top/htop with an interface that belongs in a film about hacking
• sd — sed without the regex dialect archaeology
• hyperfine — benchmarks commands properly, with warmup runs and statistics
• tldr — man pages, but just the three examples you actually wanted
• jq — not a replacement for anything; simply the correct answer to JSON on the command line
• direnv — not a replacement either: environment variables that belong to a project directory rather than whichever tab you typed them into

Where next

That’s the toolbox modernised. For the rest of the setup: a prompt that earns its keep, the keyboard shortcuts worth memorising — Ctrl+R included, now with fuzz — and tmux to keep the whole lot alive when the Wi-Fi refuses to. And once you’re writing scripts rather than one-liners, bash strict mode keeps them honest.