GUIs are fine. But these terminal tools do the same job faster, use less memory, and work over SSH.

1. lazygit — Replaces your Git GUI

A terminal UI for Git that makes staging, committing, rebasing, and resolving conflicts visual — without leaving the terminal.

brew install lazygit
lazygit

Stage individual hunks with space, interactive rebase with r, cherry-pick with c. It’s faster than GitKraken and doesn’t cost $60/year.

⭐ 53K+ stars

2. btop — Replaces Activity Monitor / Task Manager

A beautiful system monitor that shows CPU, memory, disk, and network usage with graphs and process management.

brew install btop
btop

Sort processes, filter by name, send signals, view per-core CPU usage. All in a terminal that looks better than most GUIs.

⭐ 22K+ stars

3. yazi — Replaces Finder / File Explorer

A blazing-fast terminal file manager written in Rust. Image previews, bulk rename, tabs, and plugin support.

brew install yazi
yazi

Navigate with vim keys, preview files inline (including images in supported terminals), bulk operations with visual selection. It’s what Finder should be.

⭐ 18K+ stars

4. httpie — Replaces Postman

A human-friendly HTTP client. Syntax-highlighted output, JSON support, and intuitive syntax.

# Instead of Postman, just:
http POST api.example.com/users name=test email=test@example.com

# With auth:
http GET api.example.com/me Authorization:"Bearer token123"

For quick API testing, it’s faster than opening Postman, creating a collection, and clicking through tabs.

⭐ 34K+ stars

5. lazydocker — Replaces Docker Desktop

A terminal UI for Docker. See running containers, logs, stats, and images in one view.

brew install lazydocker
lazydocker

View logs in real-time, exec into containers, restart services, prune images — all without remembering docker CLI flags. Uses a fraction of the memory Docker Desktop does.

⭐ 39K+ stars

6. glow — Replaces your Markdown viewer

Renders Markdown beautifully in the terminal. Perfect for reading READMEs, docs, and notes without opening a browser.

brew install glow
glow README.md

# Or browse all markdown files in a directory:
glow .

Syntax highlighting, tables, links, and images (in supported terminals). It even has a stash feature for bookmarking documents.

⭐ 16K+ stars

7. delta — Replaces your diff viewer

A syntax-highlighting pager for git diff, git log, and git show. Makes diffs actually readable.

brew install git-delta
# Add to ~/.gitconfig:
# [core]
#     pager = delta
# [delta]
#     navigate = true
#     side-by-side = true

Side-by-side diffs, line numbers, syntax highlighting, and word-level diff highlighting. Once you set it up, every git diff looks beautiful.

⭐ 24K+ stars

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All of these work over SSH, use minimal resources, and are keyboard-driven. Once you get used to them, going back to GUI apps feels slow.

Related: Linux Terminal cheat sheet · Bash cheat sheet · tmux cheat sheet · 8 Terminal Commands Look Like Wizard