fzf? https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Out of the box, would only help searching shell commands that have been run, so for files, things like “vim file.txt”, which is obviously not usually how files are edited (you’d use the file browser in a text editor or IDE)

However if you find a way to list all files on your system by modified time, you can pipe it to fzf for a slick fuzzy find search.

Maybe ag would work here too: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

It was Badger while it existed, because I was one of the first engineers working there (until it died a few years later wee)

Nowadays it’s just Cloudflare for convenience, they’re all kinda the same, but never Godaddy.

It’s here, it’s there, it’s everywhere. The problem with replacing things that work with something “better” is that “better” is subjective, so you end up with a new “better” way every few years, and maintaining existing systems becomes a god awful slog. See the JavaScript ecosystem.

The bash I wrote 10 years ago still works today, and it will still work in 10 more years. The same bash will very likely work on your computer, on a remote server, etc. This is the power of not chasing “better” all the time.

Try running a Ruby or Node program from 10 years ago today on your computer. Now, try running it on a random Linux server.

Please do not take this as a slight against Ruby or Node, or any other high level programming language. Bash compared to those is simply apples and oranges, they are not the same thing.

By all means, if you have a project that requires a Ruby runtime anyway, write operational scripts with Ruby, run them with Rake, etc.

Want a portable script that doesn’t depend on a complex runtime? Use bash.

If bash is too limiting, use Perl. No, seriously. Perl is fine. It is about as ubiquitously available as bash, and the standard library likely has what you need to get the job done. People blindly dismiss Perl because some blog post told them to, usually in the context of writing application code. You’re not writing application code, you’re writing scripts. Would you write an application with bash? No.