CLI Eras

(This is not-even wikipedia effort quality "history")

Ye Olden Times

• Early 1970s
• C programming language is new and revolutionary
• UNIX philosophy of small programs
  • standard IO streams of text in/out/err
  • compose with pipelines
  • "toolkit" approach

GNU FOSS

• Early 1980s
• Clean rewrites in C
• GNU/coreutils becomes integral to GNU/Linux

The Middle Ages?

• 1990s, 2000s
• Not that many attempts to replace stuff
  • OK, I'm probably missing a lot here (sorry!)
  • BUT, nothing made its way into my permanent tool belt
  • At least not whose history I'm aware of from this era

Courageous Ergonomics

• Django, Ruby on Rails bring developer ergonomics to the fore
• Some scripting language developers start to have the courage to tackle ambitious new projects
• 2006 ack
• 2011 ag
• 2012 Jakub Roztočil starts httpie
  • python version of cURL but not user-hostile

Golang Renaissance

• 2012 Go v1 released
• Starts becoming the go-to language for new/ambitious CLI projects
• docker container engine
• terraform cloud provisioning
• hugo templating engine
• mvdan/sh shell formatter
  • focusaurus Seal of Approval™
• junegunn/fzf fuzzy finder
  • focusaurus Seal of Approval™

2016+ Oxidation

• CLIs are choosing rust now
• Getting better performance (single and multi threaded)
• Fearless systems programming primitives
  • Unicode
  • Parsers
  • Awesome command line argument parsing libraries
• Developers are taking a fresh look at the ergonomics of the classic utilities

grep

• globally search a regular expression and print from ed editor
• 1973 Extracted from the ed text editor by Ken Thompson for UNIX v4
• C was the new hotness
• 1998 GNU version first commit

ack

• 2006 Andy Lester starts work on ack
• Beyond grep
• Written in perl
• Claims "shorter than grep to type"
• v2 and v3 rewrites have been done, still in perl
• More ergonomic for searching filesystem, especially code repositories

The Silver Searcher

• ag: "Shorter than ack to type"
• 2011 Geoff Greer starts project
• Written in C

ripgrep

• rg command line
• 2016 Andrew Gallant starts coding in rust
• BurntSushi/ripgrep
• focusaurus Seal of Approval™

fd

• 1971 find Released in UNIX v1
• Written in C
• Search the filesystem
• sharkdp/fd
• 2017 David Peter codes in rust
• focusaurus Seal of Approval™

exa

• 1971 ls comes with UNIX v1
• ogham/exa
• focusaurus Seal of Approval™

heatseeker

• rschmitt/heatseeker
• fuzzy menu utility
• focusaurus Seal of Approval™
• Key component in my Fuzzball Desktop Automation

sd

• 1979 UNIX v7 has sed
• chmln/sd

bat

• 1971 cat released with UNIX v1
• sharkdp/bat
• Adds syntax highlighting
• git integration, automatic paging

cw

• 1971 UNIX v1 includes wc "word count"
• "Count Words" a modern take on wc
• Freaky/cw

hexyl

• sharkdp/hexyl
• Hex editor

git absorb

• tummychow/git-absorb
• For automating fixup/rebase/squash git flows

tealdeer

• For when man pages are tool long
• tldr command
• dbrgn/tealdeer

GNU Coreutils

Wait, What?

GNU Coreutils

U WOT M8?

GNU coreutils (Oh Snap!)

• uutils/coreutils
• Rewriting all of the GNU coreutils in rust
• First high-quality, maintained, fully-cross-platform implementation

Install Tips

p=bat; docker run --rm --volume /tmp:/host/tmp \
  rust bash -c "cargo install $p && cp /usr/local/cargo/bin/$p /host/tmp" && \
  sudo install --mode 755 /tmp/$p /usr/local/bin

Awesome Rust

• rust-unofficial/awesome-rust

The End

peterlyons.com

@focusaurus