altbox.dev — A catalog of 57 alternative power tools for the Linux/Unix/macOS command line
The standard Unix tools have lasted us for decades. Every programmer should know them, but there are plenty of
tools that add on to the standard tools. For example, grep works fine for finding text, but tools
like ack and ripgrep are designed for today's modern
programmer working with large trees of heterogeneous source code.
Feedback
If you've got comments or feedback, email Andy Lester at andy@petdance.com.
Additions and errata
If you have a favorite tool that isn't here, please email Andy or submit an issue on our GitHub page: https://github.com/petdance/altbox
Articles about alternative tools
- CLI: improved, by Remy Sharp
All 57 tools
-
ack
A grep-like tool optimized for searching source code, skipping VCS dirs and binaries by default.
-
ag
A code searching tool similar to ack, with a focus on speed.
-
atop
Linux performance monitor that tracks CPU, disk, memory, and network usage per process.
-
autojump
A cd command that learns — easily navigate directories from the command line.
-
bat
A cat clone with syntax highlighting, Git integration, and automatic paging.
-
bfs
Breadth-first search for your files
-
bingrep
Parses and colorizes binary files from various operating systems and architectures.
-
bottom
A customizable, graphical process and system monitor for the terminal with widgets for CPU, memory, network, disk, and more.
-
broot
Broot is a better way to navigate directories, find files, and launch commands.
-
byobu
Text-based window manager and terminal multiplexer with enhanced keybindings and status notifications.
-
ccdiff
A colored diff that also colors inside changed lines
-
colordiff
A wrapper for diff that adds color syntax highlighting to make changes easier to read.
-
cw
A fast replacement for wc that counts words, lines, characters and bytes, with multi-threaded support.
-
diff-so-fancy
Makes diffs human-readable instead of machine-readable, to help spot defects faster.
-
difftastic
A structural diff tool that understands code syntax and shows what actually changed, not just which lines changed.
-
diskus
A minimal, fast alternative to du -sh that computes directory sizes in parallel.
-
duc
A collection of tools for indexing, inspecting, and visualizing disk usage.
-
duf
Disk usage/free utility with user-friendly, colorful output for Linux, BSD, macOS and Windows.
-
dust
A more intuitive version of du that shows which directories are using disk space.
-
duu
Recursively display disk usage in kilobytes of the given directory.
-
dysk
Graphical tool for listing your filesystems
-
exa
A modern replacement for ls with colour, Git integration, and a tree view.
-
eza
file-listing tool with colors, handling for symlinks and Git, and more
-
fd
Simple, fast, and user-friendly alternative to find.
-
fkill
Kill processes by pid, name, port, or interactively via a fuzzy-search UI.
-
fzf
A general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder for files, history, processes, and more.
-
gat
cat clone written in Go
-
glances
Cross-platform extensible monitoring tool
-
glow
Render Markdown on the CLI, with pizzazz! Can also fetch Markdown documents from the web.
-
gping
ping, but with a graph
-
gron
Makes JSON greppable
-
hstr
Easily view, navigate and search your command history with shell history TUI suggest box for bash and zsh.
-
htop
An interactive process viewer with a full-screen, colour display and mouse support.
-
hwatch
hwatch is a alternative watch that records the result of command execution and can display it history and diffs.
-
jmp
Replaces cd with intelligent regex-based directory navigation using breadth-first search.
-
klondiff
An improved diff tool that prioritizes readability by reducing noise from whitespace and short lines.
-
lftp
A sophisticated file transfer program supporting ftp, http, sftp, fish, torrent and more.
-
ls++
Colorized ls on steroids — a wrapper that lets you reorganize the order of columns.
-
lsd
The next generation ls command, with colour coding and special font icons.
-
lsvine
tree with less empty screen space, and ls * with vertical listing
-
mdcat
Renders Markdown to the terminal with syntax highlighting and inline images.
-
mtr
Network diagnostic tool that combines traceroute and ping in a single live display.
-
multitail
Monitor logfiles and command output in multiple windows in a terminal, with colorizing, filtering and merging.
-
nat
ls with colors and more
-
ncdu
ncurses disk usage analyzer, fast and easy to use in any minimal POSIX environment.
-
prettyping
ping with colour-coded, graphical output and live statistics.
-
qgrep
A fast code search tool that builds compressed, indexed databases for near-instant regex searches across large codebases.
-
rip
Command-line deletion tool focused on safety, ergonomics, and performance.
-
ripgrep
Extremely fast line-oriented search tool that respects .gitignore rules.
-
tiptop
A command-line system monitor that displays CPU, memory, network, and disk stats with real-time graphs in a modern terminal UI.
-
tmux
Terminal multiplexer — run multiple terminals from a single screen, detach and reattach sessions.
-
trash
Moves files to the trash safely and reversibly, instead of permanently deleting them.
-
tuc
A more powerful field cutter with regex delimiters, negative indexes, and flexible output formatting.
-
vgrep
A user-friendly pager and interactive front-end for grep, git-grep, and ripgrep with editor integration.
-
ydiff
View colored, incremental diff in workspace or from stdin, side by side and auto paged.
-
z
Tracks your most used directories, based on "frecency".
-
zoxide
zoxide is a smarter cd command, inspired by z and autojump.