Links, December 5th, 2025

this week’s theme: command-line programs that I think more people should know about. I use all of these tools, and while I would prefer some of them as GUI apps, I have not found any desktop apps that match their sheer utility, speed, or power.

§gitu

## A Git porcelain outside of Emacs

I started using Emacs about ten years after I started using git, and magit was a revelation in terms of how to take git’s collection of footguns and make them friendly. After moving on (it’s a long story and I might have a post in the works), I kept using Emacs solely for magit. Anyway, gitu is an attempt at creating a standalone program that works like magit.

§micro

A small editor in the tradition of pico and nano; It’s not my daily driver but it is my $GITEDITOR.

§Vizidata

VisiData is an interactive multitool for tabular data. It combines the clarity of a spreadsheet, the efficiency of the terminal, and the power of Python, into a lightweight utility which can handle millions of rows with ease.

My goto for exploring a new dataset.

§yazi

Blazing fast terminal file manager written in Rust

For me, it’s not even the speed. I could care less about it being written in Rust. This is a terminal file system navigator and manager in the vein of ranger but, well, faster, but also I think much better laid out. I haven’t felt this at-home with a file system manager since using Xtree Gold in the high school computer lab.

Working in software development tends to isolate people from the pain of managing lots of files, and even then because those people are nerds, they often know tricks for things like batch-renaming.

I recently finished up my first commissioned sound design project, juggling hundreds of files, and had to develop a process for taking the files created by my DAW, doing some sanity checks on them (piping them through some scripts doing ffmpeg stuff basically), renaming them to a convention, and so forth. Automating all of this was infeasible, but I was able to automate a lot of it, and yazi helped a lot with filling the gaps.

It is not often that I would say this, but I would pay a subscription fee for a GUI version of this program that integrated well with macOS. I’ve tried over a dozen alternate macOS file managers and have serious gripes with them all.

§zoxide

zoxide is a smarter cd command, inspired by z and autojump

This is my all purpose “I want to be somewhere else on the file system now” utility. yazi supports it directly.

§Platypus

Not a command-line utility, but rather a mac app to turn shell scripts into apps:

Platypus makes it easy to share scripts and command line programs with people who are unfamiliar with the shell interface. Native, user-friendly applications can be created with a few clicks. It is very easy to create installers, droplets, administrative applications, login items, status menu items, launchers and automations using Platypus.