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Life & fun · June 5, 2020

Choose – An alternative to cut and sometimes awk

A human-friendly and fast alternative to cut (and sometimes awk) - theryangeary/choose

Choose – An alternative to cut and sometimes awk launched on June 5, 2020 with 87 votes, #494 of 4,317 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 6 years on.

Visit github.com ↗Alternativestop 11% of June 2020

In plain words

Choose is a command-line tool designed as an alternative to the Unix cut and awk commands. It helps users extract and manipulate columns from text data more intuitively than traditional tools. The software targets developers and system administrators who work frequently with text processing tasks. Choose simplifies common operations on structured data, making it accessible to those who find cut and awk syntax challenging or limiting.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

Does a similar job

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  • Tuc – When cut doesn’t cut it2022 · github.com · ▲241

    Announcing `tuc`, a utility similar to coreutils `cut`, but more powerful. It allows to split text or bytes into parts and reassemble them in any order. I always found `cut` very practical for some tasks where `sed` or `awk` were overkill or awkward to use, but I also felt the need for more features. Some key differences from `cut`: - parts can be referenced by negative indexes - delimiters can be any number of characters long, or match a regex - can split text into lines, and reassemble them

  • Hck – a fast and flexible cut-like tool2021 · github.com · ▲151

    A sharp cut(1) clone. Contribute to sstadick/hck development by creating an account on GitHub.

  • AP
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    After having cycled through various CLI-based todo apps, I started to realise that I actually don’t need a tool at all for managing my todos. Most of the time, my use cases are quite simple, like viewing my todo items, checking them off, or adding a new one. Rather than having to memorise CLI commands for these interactions (which I’m not super good at), I figured that it’s easier for me to use my text editor directly, and have an editor plugin help me with the visual structure and some convenience functionality. So, kind-of similar to Emacs Org Mode, but without having to use Emacs. I…

  • Pick – Cmd line tool to interactively pick items from stdin to stdout2015 · github.com · ▲12

    Command line picker to pipe through. Contribute to bernardorufino/pick development by creating an account on GitHub.

  • Prig – like AWK, but uses Go for “scripting”2022 · benhoyt.com · ▲77

    Describes Prig, which is for Processing Records In Go. It's a text processing tool like AWK, but it uses Go as the scripting language.

  • LineSelect, shell utility to interactively select lines in a pipeline2023 · github.com · ▲54

    Allows you to "pause" a shell pipeline to interactively select a subset of lines to proceed with. I've always wanted a tool like this, as it effectively combines the best of shell pipes (easy to automate) and visual file managers (easy to make selections). Now that I have it I can't believe a tool like this is not already part of the standard set of shell utilities. There are so many situations where it is useful. Tested on Linux but should also work on MacOS. Also: please help me come up with a better name!

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