Modern Unix Commands

There might be dozens of "modern alternatives" to every classic Unix command if you look into them; I am not a big fan of reinventing wheels, but some of these alternatives are indeed nice and more user-friendly than their classic counterparts.

cd -> zoxide

cd needs the exact absolute or relative path to work. zoxide will remember the directories I visited, and I can quickly jump back to those directories with fuzzy path matching.

Let's say I am currently in ~/Documents/Projects/personal-blog and I want to jump to ~/.config/nix. With the classic cd, I will have to type the whole path. With cd aliased to zoxide, I only need to type cd n (supposing that ~/.config/nix is the most frequently visited directory among all matched directories).

Internally zoxide records my visits to directories in a SQLite database and sorts them based on frequency. If the first hit is not what I want, I can also interactively select from the matched list.

du -> ncdu

du is quite basic, and I usually need to add several arguments to make it somewhat usable. For example, -d 1 to control the depth, -h to make the size human-readable.

ncdu is an interactive alternative to du, and is very usable out of the box. Interestingly, I also feel it is a touch faster than du. It can totally be an alternative to those fancy disk space analyzers as well.

top -> btop

top is quite basic and looks "unexciting". htop also ships with most Unix/Linux systems and looks better.

btop might be the most "nerdy-looking" top alternative out of the box. It can be a handy tool if you are trying to make people believe you are a hacker.

At the same time, it is very feature-rich and configurable. To some extent, it is also an alternative to bandwidth monitoring tools like iftop and disk utilization tools like df.

ls -> eza

I think there is nothing wrong with the classic ls. So, as an alternative, eza just has a few quality-of-life improvements, like file type icons, Git status, and (based on personal taste) prettier colors.

It can replace the tree command as well.

vim -> nvim

Many people still haven't overcome the biggest vim challenge to this day: exit vim without turning off your computer. It took me some effort to get familiar with vim keybindings back when I was an undergraduate, but I am definitely not going back. You can simply use vim keybindings in many editors or IDEs. vim itself can feel a bit restrictive serving as a fully-featured code editor.

neovim is a rabbit hole that I won't be trying to comprehensively cover in this post (nor could I). To put it simply, it is a TUI editor that can truly be your only text editor. With countless plugins and ways to configure it, it can be a basic text editor, or a fully-featured development IDE, or anything in-between. Syntax highlighting, file browser, fuzzy search, intelligent autocompletion, debugging, AI™ integration. You name it, neovim has it.