they either don't improve upon or add functionality that's not available, or simply add eye candy. Gaining pretty colors is nice, but not worth losing familiarity with ubiquitous tools.
The thing I like about a lot of these is that I don't lose familiarity with existing tools. When I end up on a cluster that doesn't have them, I'm a bit annoyed, but I can still operate just fine.
The principle exception to this is actually fd
- I now find find
(har!) almost unusable without having a man page open in a separate terminal. But that's because fd
is so much more ergonomic and powerful, I would never give it up unless forced.
What I mean is that many of them have basically the same functionality with the same arguments. I don't mean I have pristine memory for the differences, but things like
alias ls="eza"
is basically a drop in replacement with some added features. So when I'm on a server without it, everything is basically the same, just less fancy.Helix and fd are an example of the other pattern - they are huge improvements over existing tools, to the point that when I'm forced to use the basic ones, I'm actively crippled. But as an argument not to use the better tool day-to-day, this doesn't make sense to me. Why would I force myself to suffer 95% of the time to save myself from suffering 5% of the time?
I mean, for helix/vi it's even clearer. Vanilla vi is basically unusable for me anyway, and I needed a huge number of plugins to be serviceable - on a basic cluster environment, I'm going to be crippled anyway, so...