Terminal Tools That Changed How You Work - Share Your Setup

[GoldbergFan_X]

Not IDE plugins or AI coding assistants. The command line tools that you have accumulated over time that make the terminal a different environment from what it is out of the box.

Alias setups, shell configurations, specific tools that replaced something you used to do differently, weird utilities that solve a specific problem. The kind of thing you only find out about when someone is watching you work and asks what that thing you just typed was.

What is in your setup that other people should know about?

[BiscuitTin46]

fzf for fuzzy finding. Changed how I navigate both files and command history. The reverse history search alone justified installing it

[Mesh Ross]

ripgrep instead of grep. Faster, respects gitignore by default, better output formatting. The only reason not to switch is muscle memory for the flag names

[Solid Gary]

zoxide instead of cd. Learns where you actually go and lets you jump there with a partial name. Sounds like a minor thing, is not a minor thing

[AntMan]

tmux for session management, specifically for keeping things running when you disconnect from remote machines. The alternative of losing a long running process because your VPN dropped is the teacher

[Coder65]

bat instead of cat. Syntax highlighting and git integration in a terminal pager. Another one that sounds trivial and turns out to matter for how you work

[DistantSequence]

Starship prompt. Configurable, fast, shows git status and the active language version in the prompt line. Took ten minutes to set up and I have not thought about my prompt since

[NickFury]

The thing I use that nobody expects is a simple shell function that creates a timestamped notes file for the current project. Three lines of shell script and I have a consistent daily log across everything