A few CLI tools I keep reaching for

These are the ones I install first on any new machine. Nothing exotic — just tools that are faster or calmer than the default.

Search

rg for content and fd for filenames cover 95% of what I used to do with grep -r and find, with sane defaults and no ceremony.

rg -n "TODO" --glob '!vendor/**'
fd -e md -x wc -l

Data

jq turns “let me just eyeball this JSON” into one line. It is worth the fifteen minutes it takes to learn the basics.

curl -s api/thing | jq '.[] | select(.ok) | .id'

Session

tmux and a decent prompt. A persistent session means a dropped connection is a shrug instead of a lost afternoon.

The best tool is the one you already know how to use at 2 a.m.

That is the whole list. I would rather add one good tool a year than rebuild my whole environment every quarter.