About a year ago I published Part 1 of this series, which laid a foundation for a better terminal experience: a package manager, terminal emulator (Ghostty), and shell (fish).

This time we’ll look at a set of tools that improve upon some of the essential tools you likely use every day.

tl;dr

This guide introduces the following tools:

• eza: replaces ls and tree.

• bat: syntax highlighting and other UI improvements to cat.

• zoxide: a smarter cd that learns your most-used directories.

• ripgrep: search within files, replacing grep.

• fd: search for files by name without using the confounding UI of find.

• just: a task runner that supplants make.

The full post with details on each is available here: https://www.jpt.sh/posts/like-your-terminal-part-2/

If you use any of the guide I’d love to hear from you on what you liked & didn’t as I work on a part 3 that’ll hopefully not take another full year to get around to.

-James

P.S. I’ve been running a small “TV channels” service for friends lately. It has a different newsletter, you’d like to be added to that service, sign up here: https://tally.so/r/QK6YlA