I've been using command line interface (CLI) applications for quite some time, but I feel like with the emergence of the Go and Rust programming language communities we are currently in a golden age of command line usage.
Some of the ones I recently discovered are:
- delta: a CLI program written in
rustthat acts as a pager and outputs diffs with much better user experience than the git defaults. It can also be used similarly to thediffcommand, allowing for comparisons between directories and/or files. - glow: This is a
goprogram which will show markdown files, but with formatting, not just plain text output. - bat: Yet another
rustprogram which, likecat, will display the text of whatever file you pass to it. - ripgrep: One more for the
rustbucket: I'm something of an ack/grep replacement junkie. My previous ack tool of choice was rak, the rubygem ack. This one's faster!
I typically find these tools due to references made on twitter (thanks muesli) or github dotfile repositories. But delta was found via web search after a particularly long session diff-ing two directories and thinking "Someone has to have a better way to display this."
Knowing the rust community seems to be amenable to creating (or maybe they just encourage) tools like this (see bat/ripgrep), I added 'rust' to the query. A couple search results in, there was delta. After looking at the github page and trying it out, I quickly decided it was the one for me.
I mean, look at this thing. It's beautiful.
No really, actually look at it. It shows the config options I used to get delta to show the diffs the way I wanted (i.e. what you're seeing isn't the default). And yes, it has themes that you can use. Check out their docs!