Instead of sed: sd

Why sd is better

• The syntax is simpler. You write sd before after instead of sed s/before/after/g, with no delimiters to escape.
• A string-literal mode (-F) replaces text without any regex escaping.
• In-place editing is the default when you name a file, avoiding sed's -i differences between GNU and BSD.
• It is faster on large inputs. sd's own benchmark shows a regex replacement on a 55M JSON file in 0.942 s against 11.315 s for sed, about 11.93 times faster.

When to keep sed

Keep sed in scripts that must run anywhere, and for anything beyond find and replace: deleting or printing line ranges, multi-command scripts, holding and appending lines. sd does one job.

Switching

Install sd and use it for interactive substitutions. Capture groups are $1 rather than \1. Patterns that span lines need -A (across mode). Existing sed scripts keep working; there is no need to convert them.

Watch out

sd edits files in place by default, so test the pattern on stdin first. It is a small project with few maintainers. It covers only substitution, so you still need sed or awk for other edits.

More newer, better command-line tools

• grep →, use ripgrep
• find →, use fd
• cat →, use bat
• ls →, use eza
• cd →, use zoxide
• du →, use dust
• diff →, use delta
• curl →, use xh
• htop →, use btop
• Make →, use just
• man pages →, use tldr pages