Ask HN: What is your favorite lightweight tool or CLI utility in 2026?
Tools like ripgrep, fzf, and htop have saved me countless hours over the years. What small utilities do you rely on daily?
Tools like ripgrep, fzf, and htop have saved me countless hours over the years. What small utilities do you rely on daily?
Suki - https://github.com/grandimam/suki
It's something that i built for myself. I am interested in the topic of building expertise, and spend a lot of time reading books. After a certain I realised that I needed resources that was very specific to my use case and current skill level rather than something that was static.
Suki allows me to build that curriculum, and probes progressively to help me build a real mental model.
Big fan of gron[0] and zoxide[1]. Gron for flattening and viewing JSON, and zoxide (z) for fuzzily jumping around on my system or on remote systems with z installed.
Also been using Rad [2] (disclaimer: am author) to replace my suite of Bash scripts and write new ones, quite happy with one atm which sets reminders e.g. 'remind 2h check the CI build' which will give me an OS reminder in two hours, I use it a ton at work.
[0] https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron [1] https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide [2] https://github.com/amterp/rad
GitHub CLI -- I'm using it every day and just about anything I'd want to do on GitHub, I can do straight from the command line
https://cli.github.com/
Everything/es.exe for searching every file on disk, its nice for AI agents to use
This is https://github.com/voidtools/ES (a "locate" replacement for windows-computers)
grep + es.exe on windows is the only way to look for files
ssh, scp, tmux, (grml-)zsh, grep, less, file, tar, git
The time saving of a well filled ~/.ssh/config is impressive, especially once you start juggling ProxyJump hops.
dust: https://github.com/bootandy/dust - This has ben immensely useful for me
ssh and scp just never fails to impress
-J for jumping -L for port forwarding -X for pulling remote applications to view on my laptop (waypipe for Wayland)
Adding all those, and ips and whatnot to .ssh/config so I just type:
ssh foo
setup LocalCommand, in ~/.ssh/config, so your config files get copied to every server you connect to, so you have all your aliases and scripts.
I intentionally avoid this, especially if I am not the only one connecting to a server. I see potentially breaking others' expectations for my convenience as a clear downside. Plus there is a level of paranoia there, I might have unintentionally included a credential in some config that gets copied over. That potentially increases the blast radius of a server compromise beyond what is strictly required for that specific server. I might copy over some scripts into a directory not in $PATH, easy enough to add it to my shell session if needed, CTRL+R helps as well.
...why are you sharing user accounts in this day and age? Yes, absolutely, don't mess up the shared space everyone uses, but why are you sharing that space in the first place?
I’m not saying yours does, but be careful with LocalCommand, it will often break rsync and other tools that use ssh behind the scenes.
SFTP is just simpler and better, if available.
https://github.com/rupa/z (z - jump around)
Gotta be jujutsu. I've completely stopped using git and use jj everywhere instead. It works so much better for my workflow.
...yes?
No.
EDIT: also check their comment history.
Would you mind just saying what you mean?
GP is probably implying it's a bot account doing some kind of engagement-farming.
Was going to comment this as well.
Fresh account with two Ask HN questions that are bound to get replies
jq
bearer-cli for static application security testing
This looks great, thanks for sharing.
Find, fzf, vim, ssh, …
leaf (Terminal Markdown previewer)
tmux tealdeer zoxide
vim, ls , cd, grep, cat being close seconds
rustc
screen
Is there any advantage of screen over tmux? I've kind of switched, I don't see a reason to go back.
screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200
...and easy session sharing
Ah ok true, I forgot I use it for serial stuff very occasionally too.