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2024-06-06 ⇒

# Neonix

➣ This post was meaningfully revised at 2025-04-03 @ 09:10 PM EDT. The previous revision is here, diff here. (See update history.)
➣ This post is expected to evolve over time. You can subscribe to ongoing updates here.

I've found ripgrep to be an invaluable tool. At some level it's just grep, but its speed and ergonomics make it something else. I find things much more quickly. In combination with projectile, it gives me a fast project-wide find, reducing one of the advantages of commercial IDEs over my humble emacs.

Today, Bill Mill points me to a command line tool called `fzf` which looks like kind of a command-line Swiss army knife. It certainly makes sorting through very long `find .` output a breeze.

Some of Bill's scripts use a find replacement called `fd`, which I plan to take a look at.

I think this is an interesting trend, taking venerable UNIX command-line tools and rethinking, reimplementing them with modern languages and the decades of experience since that first, revolutioary, burst of command-line creativity in the early UNIX days.

I'll let this post become a "sprout" from which I can track these kinds of tools as I encounter them.

- `fd`
  A modern retake on `find` I haven't played with yet.

- `fzf`
  A fuzzy-matching tool for interactively sorting through large command line and command completion outputs. See Bill Mill.

- `gum`
  Elegant TUI effects composable for scripting (ht Bill Mill, of course)

- `rg`
  "ripgrep". A new take on grep, super fast, seachers directories recursively, by default excluding `.git` and whatever is `.gitignore`-d.

I'll add more as I, um, `fd` them!

p.s. apparently there's a DJ called Neonix! Sorry! I'm using the, er, neologism to refer to neo-UNIX.

Update 2024-06-06: Kartik Agaram's points me to Bill Mill's "modern unix tools" page. (See below.) Which itself contains a link to a "Modern Unix" collection by Ibraheem Ahmed. So much to play with!

Update 2024-08-16: The current version of Bill Mill's "modern unix tool list" is now here.

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### Major revisions:

- 2025-04-03 @ 09:10 PM EDT — Add update regarding 'gum', ht Bill Mill (diff)
- 2024-08-16 @ 11:20 AM EDT — Add update regarding new location of Bill Mill's "modern unix tool list" (diff)
- 2024-06-06 @ 06:30 PM EDT — Add Kartik Agaram's pointer to Bill Mill's "modern unix tools" (diff)
- 2024-06-06 @ 03:35 PM EDT — Initial publication.

Timestamps represent "major", substantative revisions. There may have been subsequent typo fixes and language reworkings within a major revision, after the time displayed. For a more complete and fine-grained update history, you can view the git repository commit history. The most recent minor modification of this entry occurred 2025-04-03 @ 09:14 PM EDT.