CLI tools

• Day-to-day tasks

  • Zoxide
  • DirEnv
  • Zellij
  • OhMyPosh
  • Typos
• Development tasks

  • Delta pager
  • Helix editor
  • Bat
  • RipGrep
  • GH CLI

Day-to-day tasks

Zoxide

Link: Zoxide

An extension of the essential cd. It adds fuzzy folder name matching for your local filesystem. It uses you shell history to learn to jump to the right location.

For example, I have a folder ~/.config/nixos and don’t want to type the whole path (more than once). I can just write z nixos and it will jump directly to the nested directory.

You can write more complex queries as well and configure your shell to point cd to z to replace cd completely.

DirEnv

Link: Direnv

Scaffold system environments by just entering and exiting directories. In combination with Nix or other declarative package managers, only the packages you need are available within your projects.

Zellij

Link: Zellij

Easy terminal splitting. Detaching from views is possible to keep processes running in the background, you can re-attach later.

OhMyPosh

Link: Oh-My-Posh

Oh-My-Posh gives any shell a more meaningful shell prompt. It can display all kinds of system information such as:

• Compiler toolchain versions for many languages
• Battery state, command duration, …

You don’t have to build the prompt from scratch with individual data entries. Use one of the existing themes. My current them is a minimal one: ‘zash’.

Typos

Spell-checker for source-code that knows how to parse language grammers and adapt spell-checking rules accordingly. It’s main goal is to have a low amount of false negatives and being fast.

The most popular spell-checker in VS Code (based on cSpell), does not support language grammars and has too many false negatives.

Development tasks

Delta pager

Link: Delta

An extension of the diff command that adds syntax highlighting (for most programming languages) and paging (no need to pipe into less / more).

You can configure it as the default diff tool for Git. In your ~/.gitconfig:

[core]
pager = delta

Helix editor

Link: Helix

This terminal editor has intuitive and powerful keybindings that are suitable for beginners. It has a built-in fuzzy command and file search dialog.

It requires much less (or no) language server configuration. Most languages have syntax highlighting and basic linting support out of the box (provided the language server is installed as a system dependency).

My favourite keybindings:

• SPACE -> F: Fuzzy file-name search
• SPACE -> E: Folder browser
• gd: Goto definition
• CTRL-o: Jump back (conflicts with Zellij)

To avoid problems with Zellij, you have to lock Zellij with CTRL-g before trying to jump back with CTRL-o.

Bat

Link: Bat

A replacement for cat that adds paging (so you don’t have to pipe it through less), syntax highlighting, and line numbers.

I don’t recommend turning this into a shell alias for the standard Linux command cat. It may break other tools like claude-code that expect a cat that works in a non-interactive shell.

RipGrep

Link: Ripgrep

Recursively search your current directory for a string or regex pattern, ignoring git-ignored and hidden files. Case insenstive search: rg -i.

GH CLI

Link: Github CLI

With gh you can manage PRs from the terminal. A frequent problem I have is that I forget if my branch got merged already. You can see this right away with: gh pr view.

Most of the commands have a --web option that will automatically open the relevant page in your default web browser. For example, gh repo view --web will go to the main view of the current repository.