Modern Unix tools (Changelog Interviews #451)

This week we’re talking with Nick Janetakis about modern unix tools, and the various commands, tooling, and ways we use the commmand line. Do you Bash or Zsh? Do you use cat or bat? What about man vs tldr? Today’s show is a deep dive into unix tools you know and love, or should know and maybe love.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members get a bonus 1 minute at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!

Sponsors:

• InfluxDB – InfluxDB empowers developers to build IoT, analytics, and monitoring software. It’s purpose-built to handle massive volumes and countless sources of time-stamped data produced by sensors, applications, and infrastructure. Learn about the wide range of use cases of InfluxDB at influxdata.com/changelog
• LaunchDarkly – Ship fast. Rest easy. Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users.
• Sentry – Sentry shipped their SDK for Next.js. Now in your Next.js apps, you can capture errors, measure performance, manage releases, configure suspect commits, and automatically upload sourcemaps to view unminified JavaScript and TypeScript with zero(-ish) configuration. Use the code THECHANGELOG and get the team plan free for three months.
• Grafana Cloud – Our dashboard of choice Grafana is the open and composable observability and data visualization platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Postgres and many more.

Featuring:

• Nick Janetakis – Website, GitHub, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• Modern alternatives to Unix commands
• Modern Unix
• bat
• fzf
• mcfly
• envsubst from GNU gettext; envsubst in Go
  • Nick’s blog post on envsubst
• https://uses.tech
• NanoVMs let you run your apps faster and safer with Unikernels

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!