Tips to make Claude Code work faster!

Since the last few weeks, I spent most of my day observing what Claude Code is doing… it’s basically become the Operating System of my computer. I notice that it spends most of the time running shell commands—searching files, processing text, navigating directories. At this point, I’m pretty sure it knows my filesystem better than I do.

So I don’t use the shell directly anymore—I always use Claude Code as my interface. Yesterday I asked it where I left my car keys and was genuinely disappointed when it couldn’t grep those.

At first I thought it was a bug, so I tried to intervene and grep it myself. But then I noticed I was in a virtual machine (I run Claude Code in Docker for security reasons) and I didn’t have my ripgrep tool. On my actual machine, I have customized the shell to use these better tools. This got me thinking: Why not give high quality tools to Claude Code (or Gemini CLI) as well?

The tip is to replace all traditional GNU tools with their Rust alternatives, so you can make these operations 5-20x faster, dramatically improving your Claude Code performance.

Old school tools

When Claude Code executes commands like searching for a function across your codebase, it runs:

find . -name "*.ts" -o -name "*.tsx" | xargs grep "useState"

These traditional tools process files sequentially. In large projects, this means waiting seconds or even minutes for results, multiplying across dozens of commands per session.

Rust is fast!

Modern Rust tools use parallel processing, smarter algorithms, and respect .gitignore by default:

File Search & Text Processing

ripgrep (rg) replaces grep - Parallel text search, 5-20x faster
fd replaces find - Parallel file finding, 5-10x faster
sd replaces sed - Simpler syntax, faster processing

File Management

eza replaces ls - Modern listing with git integration
bat replaces cat - Syntax highlighting and git diffs
dust replaces du - Intuitive disk usage visualization

System Monitoring

bottom (btm) replaces top - Better resource monitoring
procs replaces ps - Modern process viewer

Development Tools

git-delta - Enhanced git diffs with syntax highlighting
hyperfine - Command-line benchmarking tool
tokei - Fast code statistics and line counting

Navigation

zoxide replaces cd - Learns your habits, jump to directories faster
starship - Fast, customizable shell prompt

How to make Claude Code Use Them Automatically

The key: shell aliases. When Claude Code calls standard commands, it’ll use the faster versions:

# Add to ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc
alias grep='rg'
alias find='fd'
alias ls='eza'
alias cat='bat'
alias sed='sd'
alias du='dust'
alias top='btm'
alias ps='procs'
alias cd='z'  # for zoxide

# Also add this line for zoxide initialization
eval "$(zoxide init zsh)"  # or bash

Now when Claude Code searches your codebase, it automatically benefits from:

Multi-threaded execution
Smart .gitignore handling (no more searching node_modules!)
Better default options

Real Impact Example

Before: Claude Code searching a React codebase

$ time find . -name "*.tsx" | xargs grep "useState"
# 4.2 seconds

After: Same search with Rust tools

$ time fd -e tsx | xargs rg "useState"  
# 0.3 seconds

That’s 14x faster for a single operation. Across a full Claude Code session with dozens of searches, file operations, and text processing commands, you’ll save minutes of waiting.

Quick Setup

Install the tools (Homebrew: brew install ripgrep fd eza bat sd dust bottom procs git-delta hyperfine tokei zoxide starship)
Add the aliases to your shell config
Restart your terminal
Claude Code automatically uses the faster versions

Worth Noting

These tools have slightly different defaults (e.g., ripgrep ignores hidden files)
Original commands still available with backslash: \grep

By spending 5 minutes on this setup, every Claude Code session becomes noticeably faster. Less waiting, more coding.