Lejun's Command-Line Toolbox

A curated collection of modern command-line tools and shell configurations for productive terminal-based development. Works on Linux, macOS, or WSL on Windows — whether you're setting up a local development environment or a remote server without root access.

The toolbox includes a set of tools I find essential for daily development (see CLI Tools Included below), along with their configurations. For local (Linux) desktop setup recommendations, see my dotfile repo.

Installation

The install.sh script handles everything. It backs up any existing configs before installing.

Clone the Repository

git clone https://github.com/aik2mlj/cli-toolbox.git && cd cli-toolbox

System-wide Installation

If you are on a machine with sudo access, and your distro packages are reasonably up-to-date (Arch Linux, Fedora, macOS), use your package manager (dnf, pacman, brew, etc.) for the binaries, and only apply the configs:

# for macOS with Homebrew
brew install fish bat btop difftastic dust eza fd sevenzip fzf lazygit mcat neovim ripgrep starship yazi zoxide ffmpeg-full jq poppler resvg imagemagick-full mediainfo font-symbols-only-nerd-font
brew link ffmpeg-full imagemagick-full -f --overwrite

# for Arch Linux
paru -S --needed fish bat btop difftastic dust eza fd 7zip fzf lazygit mcat-bin neovim ripgrep starship yazi zoxide ffmpeg jq poppler resvg imagemagick mediainfo

# apply the configs
./install.sh --config-only                        # install essential configs only
./install.sh --config-only --overwrite            # install essential configs, overwrite existing

Do remember to upgrade the binaries from time to time with your package manager.

User-scoped (Rootless) Installation

Choose this if you don't have root access to the machine, e.g., a restricted server. Or you are on Linux distros with dated packages in the official repo, like Ubuntu or Debian (since this toolbox is only tested on the latest versions). This downloads all binaries to ~/.local/bin/ (no root needed) and installs configs:

./install.sh                # install binaries + essential configs (with backup)
./install.sh --overwrite    # same, without backing up existing config files

To just install the binaries or to upgrade (reinstall) them:

# these are equivalent
./install.sh --binary-only
./install.sh --upgrade

You may additionally install ffmpeg (from this repo’s nightly binary) using this script, if you don't have it already. ffmpeg is a powerful tool for audio and video processing. It can be included for video thumbnail preview in yazi.

./install.sh --ffmpeg

Customized Installation

If you just want to install a few tools missing from your repo, or some additional tools that are not included here, you can use gah to manually install them:

./install.sh --gah                                # this installs gah, the binary installer, to ~/.local/bin/
gah install Skardyy/mcat                          # say, mcat is not in your repo
gah install jesseduffield/lazydocker              # install lazydocker, which is not included in the toolbox

Run gah --help to check the usage. Consult the gah documentation for more details.

And of course, you can manually copy individual config files in this repo to their respective location in your home directory.

Terminal Emulator

Use a modern terminal emulator that renders images and Nerd Font well. I recommend Ghostty which just works out-of-the-box, or Kitty if you need more features and extensive configurability (what I use).

• You may find it very helpful knowing your emulator's tab / window management and various keybindings. For Ghostty, take a look at this cheat sheet.

Now, simply open the emulator and enjoy your beautified and supercharged terminal!

Post Installation

• You may want to set the default shell to fish.

  • If this is a local setup, change the login shell with chsh -s $(which fish). If this fails, add fish to /etc/shells first with sudo sh -c 'echo $(which fish) >> /etc/shells'.
    • You may also just need to set fish as a command to run at launch in your terminal emulator's settings without changing the login shell. For Ghostty users, this is already covered in this config.
  • If this is a remote server without a system-wide fish installed, you may want to check this setup guide.
    • If you always launch tmux, you are already covered — the default shell in tmux has been set to fish.

• If you want to install additional binaries to ~/.local/bin/, see Customized Installation

• Check out Optional for additional tools and configs that may interests you.

CLI Tools Included

Here is a brief overview. I recommend browsing the quick start guide of each tool following the link, but only when you need it. Most of them are self-explanatory and intuitive to get started.

• fish - A smart and user-friendly command line shell. Smarter tabs, autocompletion and syntax highlighting built-in.
  • Recommended reading: The fish shell tutorial and interactive guide.
• bat - A cat clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration. Used by fzf.fish to preview files in directory search.
• btop - A cool monitoring tool for system resources. htop alternative.
• difftastic: A structural diff tool that understands syntax.
  • It provides a more intuitive and readable diff output compared to diff or git diff, especially for code changes.
• dust - A more intuitive version of du in rust, handy to inspect disk usage.
• eza - A modern alternative to ls with colors and icons.
• fd - A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find.
• 7-zip - A file archiver with a high compression ratio.
• fzf - A blazingly fast command-line fuzzy finder.
• lazygit - An intuitive terminal UI for git.
  • With usually just a few keystrokes to perform pull, fetch, push, or commit, I found it much easier to use than git commands and all the GUI git tools. It also includes advanced git cherry-picking, rebasing, and stash management features at hand.
• mcat - A versatile viewer that renders many file types (markdown, image/video, pdf, docx, pptx, xlsx, html, etc.) directly in terminal. Very useful for yazi preview.
• neovim - A hyperextensible Vim-based text editor. My choice of text editor.
• ripgrep - A modern (and much faster) alternative to grep. Recursively searches directories for a regex pattern.
• starship - A minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell.
• yazi - A blazing fast terminal file manager written in Rust.
  • A must have for terminal browsing. Stop cding around and using ls to browse files. It has built-in fuzzy search, code highlighting, decompression, and image previews. Please see the quick start docs and this cheat sheet.
• zoxide - A smarter cd command that remembers your most used directories and allows you to jump to them quickly.

Some additional tools (jq, poppler, ffmpeg, resvg, ImageMagick, mediainfo) are needed as dependencies for complete yazi preview function. See yazi doc for the reasons they are needed.

• If you are using the rootless installation, jq, resvg, imagemagick (magick), and mediainfo are installed automatically. ffmpeg is available separately (see User-scoped Installation) due to its large binary size; poppler unfortunately cannot be easily installed as a static binary, you may install it rootlessly from conda-forge.

Configuration Details

• fish - I use fish as my shell. The configuration includes some useful functions, abbreviations and aliases. Please see the main configuration file at ~/.config/fish/config.fish for details. Some things to note:

  • z is an alias for zoxide. Try simply z <partial name of a directory you've been to> to jump to that directory.
  • The default prompt is set to use starship, which provides a nice and informative prompt.
  • The default editor is set to neovim. vim will become nvim. You can comment out the line if you don't want this behavior.
  • ctrl + o to open the file manager yazi and will change the current working directory when exiting (the wrapper is configured in functions/yazi-cd.fish).
  • Fuzzy-finder keybindings come from fzf.fish.
    • ctrl + r to search through your command history.
    • ctrl + f to search through your files under the current directory.
  • ls, ll, etc. are mapped to eza that shows colors and icons.
  • To speed up the shell startup, conda init is lazy-loaded only after you run conda command for the first time.

• yazi - The configuration files are located at ~/.config/yazi/. I basically installed some plugins to enhance the functionality and the look.

  • shift + j/k to navigate 5 times faster in the file list. opt/alt + j/k to seek 5 units up/down in the preview (e.g., see the next page of the previewed text file, or see the next frame of the previewed video).
  • smart-enter.yazi to open files or enter directories in one key (since I like vim keybindings, l).
  • piper.yazi to pipe any shell command as a previewer.
  • full-border.yazi to make it look fancier.
  • git.yazi to show the status of git file changes in the file list.
  • compress.yazi to compress selected files to an archive (shortcut: ca).
  • mediainfo.yazi to show thumbnail using ffmpeg and media metadata using mediainfo (toggle showing metadata: <f9>).

• lazygit - The configuration file is located at ~/.config/lazygit/config.yml. The default diff tool is set to difftastic, which provides a more intuitive diff output.

• ghostty - Default shell is set to fish in ~/.config/ghostty/config.ghostty.

• tmux - I usually rely on my terminal emulator's tab / window management for multi-tasking on a local machine. But when working on remote servers, tmux is essential to keep sessions alive when you disconnect. This configuration uses oh my tmux. It includes a status bar with system information, battery status, and more. Some things to note:

  • Please see the original repository for keybindings and smart usages.
    • It adds a more handy prefix ctrl + a (compared to the default ctrl + b).
    • It includes some useful keybindings, such as <prefix> + h/j/k/l to switch between panes, and <prefix> Ctrl + h/j/k/l to switch between windows.
  • My personal tweaks are under the user customizations section in the ~/.tmux.conf.local file.
    • The default shell in tmux is set to fish. You may change it to your preferred shell by modifying the default-shell line.
    • A fix that enable ssh agent forwarding to work after re-attaching to tmux is included. See this blog for more details.

Optional

• Neovim configuration: If you want to go hard-core using Neovim as your main editor in the terminal. I recommend LazyVim as a base setup. It saves a tone of time providing a full-fledged IDE experience out of the box. But still be prepared to spend a fare amount of time to go through all the tools and configure your own version. This repo contains a minimum Lazyvim config tweaked to my liking. You can copy the Neovim config in this repo by

  ./install.sh --nvim-config

• If you are Lejun or you want to use every config in this repo, append --all flag to ./install.sh. Do take a look at all the configs in the repo before applying everything.

• You can find cool fonts that support command-line icons at Nerd Fonts. Pick one you like, download and install it, and set it as the font in your terminal emulator. This might be needed if you notice some icons are missing (displayed as empty squares).

• uv: An extremely fast Python package and project manager, written in Rust. Highly recommended over conda or venv for managing Python environments in most cases — a single tool that replaces pip, pip-tools, pipx, poetry, pyenv, twine, virtualenv, and more, and 10–100x faster than pip. Install with gah install astral-sh/uv or your package manager.

• fresh: A powerful terminal text editor and IDE with zero learning curve. Give it a try if you want a VSCode-like experience in the terminal.

• Zellij: Tired of remembering all the tmux shortcuts? zellij is a modern Rust alternative to tmux with a more intuitive UI, keybindings, and many great features.

• Lazydocker: Similar to lazygit, but for Docker. It provides a terminal UI for managing Docker containers, images, and volumes.

• nvtop or nvitop for GPU monitoring: If you are working with GPUs, these tools provide a nice terminal UI to monitor GPU usage, memory, and processes.

• Wanna manage your configuration files gracefully? Check out dotfiles for tutorials and tools. My choice is chezmoi.

• For local (Linux) desktop setup recommendations, see my dotfile repo.

Technical Details

If you choose to use this script to install the binaries (instead of using your package manager if you are on a local machine), they are downloaded at install time from their official GitHub releases using gah (vendored and modified in tools/gah). It will automatically detect your system architecture and download the appropriate binaries. All tools, including jq (required by gah) if not already present, are installed to ~/.local/bin/ without root.