325 lines
15 KiB
Markdown
325 lines
15 KiB
Markdown
+++
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title = "A modern CLI renaissance?"
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date = 2024-03-04T12:20:02-06:00
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draft = true
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+++
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<!--
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tool,link,year,language
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ls,,1961,c
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cat,,1971,c
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cd,,1971,c
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cp,,1971,c
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man,,1971,c
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rm,,1971,c
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grep,,1973,c
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diff,,1974,c
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sed,,1974,c
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bc,,1975,c
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make,,1976,c
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vi,,1976,c
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TeX,,1978,pascal
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bourne shell,,1979,c
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awk,,1985,c
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screen,,1987,c
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bash,https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/,1989,c
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zsh,https://www.zsh.org/,1990,c
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vim,https://www.vim.org/,1991,c
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midnight commander,,1994,c
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ssh,,1995,c
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curl,https://github.com/curl/curl,1996,c
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fish,https://fishshell.com/,2005,c++ (currently being rewritten in rust)
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fossil,https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki,2006,c
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tmux,https://github.com/tmux/tmux,2007,c
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git,https://git-scm.com/,2008,c
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go 1.0,https://go.dev/,2012,go
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fzf,https://github.com/junegunn/fzf,2013,go
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eza/exa,https://github.com/eza-community/eza,2014,rust
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neovim,https://neovim.io/,2015,c
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pueue,https://github.com/Nukesor/pueue,2015,rust
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rust 1.0,https://www.rust-lang.org/,2015,rust
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just,https://github.com/casey/just,2016,rust
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micro,https://micro-editor.github.io/,2016,go
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nnn,https://github.com/jarun/nnn,2016,c
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ripgrep,https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep,2016,rust
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fd,https://github.com/sharkdp/fd,2017,rust
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bat,https://github.com/sharkdp/bat,2018,rust
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broot,https://dystroy.org/broot/,2018,rust
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difftastic,https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/,2018,rust
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hyperfine,https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine,2018,rust
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lazygit,https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit,2018,go
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lsd,https://github.com/lsd-rs/lsd,2018,rust
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nushell,https://www.nushell.sh/,2018,rust
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scc,https://github.com/boyter/scc,2018,go
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sd,https://github.com/chmln/sd,2018,rust
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git-delta,https://github.com/dandavison/delta,2019,rust
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grex,https://github.com/pemistahl/grex,2019,rust
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starship,https://starship.rs/,2019,rust
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tre,https://github.com/dduan/tre,2019,rust
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typst,https://typst.app/,2019,rust
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diskonaut,https://github.com/imsnif/diskonaut,2020,rust
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helix,https://helix-editor.com/,2020,rust
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pijul,https://pijul.org/,2020,rust
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zellij,https://zellij.dev/,2020,rust
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zoxide,https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide,2020,rust
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btop,https://github.com/aristocratos/btop,2021,c++
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ast-grep,https://github.com/ast-grep/ast-grep,2022,rust
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yazi,https://github.com/sxyazi/yazi,2024,rust
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-->
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<!--
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open tmp.csv |
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sort-by year tool |
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update tool {|i| if ($i.link != "") {$"[($i.tool)]\(($i.link)\)"} else {$i.tool}} |
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select tool year language |
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to md |
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xsel -bi
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-->
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<!--
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ls specifically can trace its history to 1961
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-->
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Take a look at this [table](#appendix-the-tools) at the bottom of the page.
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Ill wait.
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Notice the relative scarcity between ~1995 and ~2015?
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Id like to talk about a trend Ive seen these past few years,
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where people are rewriting and rethinking staples of the command line interface,
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why I think this trend might be happening,
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and why I think this trend is a good thing.
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## History
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The terminal and the command line interface have been staples of computer user interfaces before computer monitors were even available,
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with some of the first computers offering an interactive mode in the late 1950's.
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The recognizable Linux terminal traces its linage to the very first version of Unix in 1971.
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Many utilities that a Linux user interacts with every day,
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commands like `rm`, `cat`, `cd`, `cp`, `man`, and a host of other core commands trace their initial versions to this first version of Unix.
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Other tools are a bit newer, such as `sed` (1974), `diff` (1974) `bc` (1975), `make` (1976), or `vi` (1976).
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There were a few more tools introduced in the 90's, such as `vim` (1991) and `ssh` (1995), but you get the picture.
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The majority of the foundational CLI tools on a Linux pc, even one installed yesterday, are older than Linux itself is.
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## Ok, so?
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Now, theres nothing wrong with this.
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The tools still work fine, but in the half-century since they were first written,
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terminals and the broader Linux ecosystem have all changed.
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Terminals now have capacity to display more colours, Unicode symbols, and even inline images.
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Terminal programs now coexist with graphical user interfaces,
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and only a small subset of computer users even know they exist,
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whereas in the past, terminals were the only way one interacted with the computer.
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Perhaps more importantly, our knowledge has expanded:
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our knowledge of user interfaces,
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of what works and what doesnt,
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of what usecases are common and what usecases are niche,
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the way that error messages can teach,
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the value of a good out of the box experience,
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and the value of documentation that is easy to find and digest.
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These changes to the environment surrounding CLI apps in recent years have
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led to a resurgence in development of command line utilities.
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Instead of just developing completely new tools or cloning old tools,
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Ive noticed that people are rethinking and reinventing tools that have existed since the early days of Unix.
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This isnt just some compulsive need to rewrite every tool out there in your favorite language.
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People are looking at the problem these tools set out to solve,
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and coming up with their own solutions to them,
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exploring the space of possible solutions and taking new approaches.
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Its this exploration of the solution space that id like to take a look at:
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the ways that tools are changing,
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why people are changing them,
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and what kicked off this phenomenon.
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## The lessons learned from the past
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A large amount of the innovation in the area, I think,
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can be attributed to lessons that have been learned in 50 years of using software:
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sharp edges we have repeatedly cut ourselves on,
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unintuitive interfaces that repeatedly trip us up,
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and growing frustration at the limitations that maintaining decades of backwards compatibility imposes on our tools.
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These lessons have been gathering in the collective conciousness;
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through cheatsheets, guides, and FAQs;
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resources to guide us through esoteric error messages, complex configurations, and dozens upon dozens of flags.
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Id like to go over a couple of the more prominent lessons that I feel terminal tools have learned in the past several decades.
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### A good out of the box experience
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While configurability is great,
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one should not need to learn a new configuration language and dozens or hundreds of options to get a usable piece of software.
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Configuration should be for customization, not setup.
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One of the earliest examples of this principle may be the fish shell.
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Both zsh and fish have powerful prompt and autocompletion engines,
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but zsh requires you to setup a custom prompt and enable completions in order to use the features that set it apart from the competition.
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With no config file, zsh is no better than bash.
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When starting fish for the first time, however,
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its powerful autocompletion and information rich prompt are front and center with no configuration required.
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Of course, fish still has the same level of configurability as zsh, it just also has sensible defaults.
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To demonstrate my point, this is the default prompt for zsh with no configuration.
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It *only* shows the hostname, none of the advanced features you can get out of a zsh prompt even without plugins.
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Here is bash's prompt.
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It actually gives more info than zsh's, even though zsh can do more when properly configured.
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And here is fish's default prompt.
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It has a few colours, shows everything the bash prompt does, and additionally shows the git branch we are on.
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Text editors are another great example of the evolution of out of the box defaults.
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Vim and Neovim both improved on their predecessors,
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but much of that improvement is locked behind extremely complex configuration experiences and plugins.
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Heres four different terminal text editors with no configuration applied:
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Vi, (top left) is our baseline, and, as far as I can tell, doesnt actually
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support much for configuration. What you see out of the box is more or less
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whats there.
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Vim (top right) greatly improved on Vi, adding things such as syntax highlighting, line numbers, spellchecking, split windows, folding, and even basic autocompletion.
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However, everything but syntax highlighting is either extremely clunky or outright disabled without configuration.
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(for example, the earliest things I did when I first made a `.vimrc` was to enable indent folding,
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make some better keybinds for navigating windows, and adding a line number ruler to the side)
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Neovim (bottom left) further improved on Vim, adding support for Treesitter and the Language Server Protocol,
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but the out of the box experience is the *exact* same as vim!
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In order to take advantage of the LSP and Treesitter support, you have to install plugins,
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which means learning a Nvim package manager, learning how to configure LSPs,
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and configuring a new LSP for every language you want to use it with
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(or finding out about Mason and being OK with having multiple levels of package management in your Nvim install alone).
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Dont get me wrong: Neovim is a great editor once you get over the hump.
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I still use it as my daily driver, but so much of its functionality is simply hidden.
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Then we have the Helix (bottom right) editor.
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Slightly glaring default colour scheme aside, everything is just *there*.
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Helix doesnt have plugin support [yet](https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/3806),
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but it has so much stuff in core that,
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looking through my neovim plugins,
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pretty much all of them are in the core editor!
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(Ironically, the one feature that I feel helix is missing, [folding](https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/1840),
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is a core part of neovim, albeit one that requires some configuration to get good use out of).
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Helix does have a config file where you can change a huge amount of settings,
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but its an extremely usable IDE out of the box thanks to having all of its features enabled by default.
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### Friendly error messages
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<!-- look at nushells error messages -->
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[before](../nushell)
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### Concise and discoverable documentation
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<!-- look at zellij and helix and their built in keymap cheatsheets-->
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### Common usecases should be easy
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<!-- look at sd, rg, and fd-->
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Where possible, documentation should not even be required for the most common use cases.
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Whenever I want to use `find`, I almost always have to first look at the man page,
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as I dont use it quite often enough to memorize it.
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But thats totally unneeded! 90% of my uses of `find` take the form of `find ./ -name "*foo*"`.
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With [fd](https://github.com/sharkdp/fd), the exact same invocation is a simple `fd foo`, dead simple, no man page needed.
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Of course, 10% of the time im doing something else and have to look at the manual even with fd,
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but the point is that manuals are for when you want to do something with the tool that is not the most common usecase.
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There are many other examples as well. How many of your grep invocations are in the form of `grep -R 'foo' ./`?
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Most of mine are. [Ripgrep](https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep) shortens that to `rg foo`
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while still having all the power of grep when I need it, and it is faster to boot!
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This isnt to say that tools should 'dumb themselves down' or hobble themselves to make them easier to use.
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However they should keep in mind the most common usecase that their tool is likely to be used in,
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and streamline that usecase.
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## Shedding historical baggage
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Many tools were made for one thing, and over time have evolved into another thing entirely.
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This can happen by conscious design or, more commonly,
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from an industry or community picking a tool up and using it for something it was not originally designed for.
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While hacking tools for uses they were not designed for is always fun and in many cases the only way to do something,
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its perhaps better to make a dedicated tool when the new usecase eclipses
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<!-- look at just command runner, simplifying the common use case of make-->
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## The trendsetter
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<!-- did neovim kick this all off?-->
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## The languages
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<!-- most of the new tools are written in rust and go.-->
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<!-- rusts clap and gos cobra, CLI argument parsing libraries, help with this.-->
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## Appendix: the tools
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This is an extremely unscientific table of command line tools that I have tried,
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have used, or currently use. It is assuredly incomplete, but *should* be broadly
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representative. The date data has been gathered from the first git commit where
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available, wikipedia otherwise, and sorting is by year first, then alphabetical.
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|tool|year|language|
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|-|-|-|
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|ls|1961|c|
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|cat|1971|c|
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|cd|1971|c|
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|cp|1971|c|
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|man|1971|c|
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|rm|1971|c|
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|grep|1973|c|
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|diff|1974|c|
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|sed|1974|c|
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|bc|1975|c|
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|make|1976|c|
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|vi|1976|c|
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|TeX|1978|pascal|
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|bourne shell|1979|c|
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|awk|1985|c|
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|screen|1987|c|
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|[bash](https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/)|1989|c|
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|[zsh](https://www.zsh.org/)|1990|c|
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|[vim](https://www.vim.org/)|1991|c|
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|midnight commander|1994|c|
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|ssh|1995|c|
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|[curl](https://github.com/curl/curl)|1996|c|
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|[fish](https://fishshell.com/)|2005|c++ (currently being rewritten in rust)|
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|[fossil](https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki)|2006|c|
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|[tmux](https://github.com/tmux/tmux)|2007|c|
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|[git](https://git-scm.com/)|2008|c|
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|[go 1.0](https://go.dev/)|2012|go|
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|[fzf](https://github.com/junegunn/fzf)|2013|go|
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|[eza/exa](https://github.com/eza-community/eza)|2014|rust|
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|[neovim](https://neovim.io/)|2015|c|
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|[pueue](https://github.com/Nukesor/pueue)|2015|rust|
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|[rust 1.0](https://www.rust-lang.org/)|2015|rust|
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|[just](https://github.com/casey/just)|2016|rust|
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|[micro](https://micro-editor.github.io/)|2016|go|
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|[nnn](https://github.com/jarun/nnn)|2016|c|
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|[ripgrep](https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep)|2016|rust|
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|[fd](https://github.com/sharkdp/fd)|2017|rust|
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|[bat](https://github.com/sharkdp/bat)|2018|rust|
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|[broot](https://dystroy.org/broot/)|2018|rust|
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|[difftastic](https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/)|2018|rust|
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|[hyperfine](https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine)|2018|rust|
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|[lazygit](https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit)|2018|go|
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|[lsd](https://github.com/lsd-rs/lsd)|2018|rust|
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|[nushell](https://www.nushell.sh/)|2018|rust|
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|[scc](https://github.com/boyter/scc)|2018|go|
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|[sd](https://github.com/chmln/sd)|2018|rust|
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|[git-delta](https://github.com/dandavison/delta)|2019|rust|
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|[grex](https://github.com/pemistahl/grex)|2019|rust|
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|[starship](https://starship.rs/)|2019|rust|
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|[tre](https://github.com/dduan/tre)|2019|rust|
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|[typst](https://typst.app/)|2019|rust|
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|[diskonaut](https://github.com/imsnif/diskonaut)|2020|rust|
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|[helix](https://helix-editor.com/)|2020|rust|
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|[pijul](https://pijul.org/)|2020|rust|
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|[zellij](https://zellij.dev/)|2020|rust|
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|[zoxide](https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide)|2020|rust|
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|[btop](https://github.com/aristocratos/btop)|2021|c++|
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|[ast-grep](https://github.com/ast-grep/ast-grep)|2022|rust|
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|[yazi](https://github.com/sxyazi/yazi)|2024|rust|
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