2025 has been the year of the terminal. Now retired, I find joy in learning and playing with networking, Proxmox VMs or LXC’s, and automating these with Terraform & Ansible. Given that a lot of this requires SSH’ing into mostly Linux, I’ve been spending a lot of my time on the terminal and relying on multi-platform tools.
Conveniently, the terminal is also a Liquid Glass free zone. As a result, I’ve adjusted my workflow to be as keyboard-centric as possible. Along the way I’ve discovered and incorporated the following staples:
Yazi - File manager that runs circles around my beloved Finder.
Text Editors:
Vim - Steep’ish learning curve but well worth it. I tried the Neovim rathole, but settled on Vim with very few plugins.
Zed - Replaced VSCode for SSH capable GUI editing and AI support. An added bonus is that it too supports Vim keybindings.
Tmux - Because friends don’t let friends drive terminal sessions alone.
At the Mac GUI layer, I’m an Alfred user for lots of reasons, but lately discovered LeaderKey to extent my growing reliance on conflict-less keyboard shortcuts. Easy to setup and intuitive to use.
I still use the trackpad for gestures but the keyboard is king these days. How lucky are we that the Mac is such a flexible tool?
Any other terminal jockeys out there with tips/tools to share?
No, I wouldn’t consider that irrational. There is no guarantee that everything on GitHub works well and is malware free. Open source software is preferred by some for several reasons, one of which is “anyone can inspect the code”.
But that doesn’t mean anyone IS inspecting the code. At one time I ran multiple linux servers despite the fact that I didn’t have the skill to inspect the software. So I relied on RedHat and Suse, etc. and tried to do my homework before downloading other OS code.
Very cool! A couple of tools I have not heard of. I may need to play around with Yazi a little during my holiday break.
I also spend a lot of time in the terminal, but I’ve got iTerm + Oh My ZSH customized the way I want, despite some of the new shiny tools I keep seeing. Though, if I were to start fresh, I would look hard a Ghostly and some of the other tools.
What’s funny, is with Codex and Claude CLI, I find myself in the terminal even more than usual these days.
Yeah, I’ve tried On My Zsh and Starship but found OMZ does way more than I need, so I got back to basics and removed them. If you have it as you want it, I recommend sticking with it.
I’m a big fan & user of Tailscale but was not aware of Chat-tails…will check it out.
Thanks for the tip.
BTW: I was just re-reading my original post and realize there may be a t-shirt design in “Terminal, a Liquid Glass free zone”
Fell in love with unix back in the mid to late 80’s and to this day roughly 80% of my computer time is spent using the terminal / shell. Main tools are zsh, emacs, ssh, tmux, and mutt for email.
Ha! Looks like Pegasus is still around and being actively developed. My email client progression was Berkeley mail → elm → mutt and I’ve yet to see any reason to move on from mutt.
Nice lists/suggestions. I’m using zellij instead of tmux. Not necessarily recommending it, but, I like its defaults and args and config have been enough override. Usually initializing it with a script that loads into each pane relative to the current directory.
For my own tui apps, I build them on crossterm and ratatui.
I find Emacs to be a fascinating piece of software, having been around since the 70’s (1984 for modern GNU Emacs) and still in active development. It can be molded into a very personal tool that can handle pretty much anything one wishes to do. To quote Paul Ford from usesthis.com:
Blockquote
" I’ve used Emacs for decades and it’s possible I will continue to use it until I die; it is a lifelong piece of software. Like Unix, it has been around as long as I have, and keeps evolving."
And with orgmode I’ve been able to replace some apps like Apple Reminders and Obsidian.
The learning curve may be a bit steep, but if one starts slow with the built in tutorial and adds things over time, it’s well worth the effort IMHO.
I’m with you on the Neovim ra(bbi)t hole – I can install the base version easily with Homebrow, but whenever I try setting up LazyVim (which seems to be the goto recommendation), it just refuses to work. I’ve tried it on MacOS, Linux, and FreeBSD and the same thing happens. I expect I’m missing some small but vital step that is obvious to the writers of the documentation and completely obscure to me… And Vim is more than good enough not to spend much time trying to sort this out.
I still stick with iTerm2 because I’m comfortable with it and don’t really see any advantage in changing.
As for Tmux – have you tried Zellij? It doesn’t do much more than Tmux (may even do less – I don’t use the fancy features of either) but it takes less effort to configure and the features are a bit more discoverable.
As for Emacs, I am in the nth[FN1] iteration of a Death Cycle:
Get tempted to try Emacs again
Set the basics up swearing that this time I will only use the features I desperately need
Spend hours and weeks configuring org mode and a couple of other modes
Get overwhelmed and/or bored and go back to Vim / BBEdit / DEVONthink / IA Writer / Scrivener / Omnifocus and every other program I’ve tried to replicate in Emacs
At the moment I’m in the aftermath of step 4 again.
[FN1] I think currently n = 7 or possibly 17 or 27. I’ve been playing with Emacs since the days when XEmacs was the sensible option, so what’s that, 30 years?
The best thing about GitHub is that mostly anyone can fork a repo or submit a pull request. The worst thing about GitHub is that mostly anyone can fork a repo or submit a pull request.
This might qualify as the understatement of the year LOL.
Personally I use both vim and emacs depending on the task at hand. If I want multiple windows I use emacs; if I’m doing a one-off I use vim, but like vi, without many of the newer features.
The fact that Mac OS X was BSD-based is what drew me from several years of Linux as my main OS, so I find myself spending about as much time in the terminal as a browser. I’m with you on ghostty, vim, mutt and tmux. This year I’ve been adding newsboat into the mix as well.
I think the differences between shells for light interactive use is smaller than the number of posts declaring how switching to another shell will revolutionise your life. Over the years I’ve cycled between bash, zsh and ksh (currently zsh) but to be honest for lightweight use they are essentially feature-identical to me. I’ve never seen the need to add oh-my-zsh, but then again my zshrc clocks in at only 139 lines.
I would say not totally irrational but also not really realistic. There is good and bad in open source repos.
But for GitHub Specifically I won’t use them for my repos because of the Microsoft connection.
Hey…
I started using Terminal some years ago when I got fed up with UI options of apps. I want software to be fast and simple and I hate clunky Electron based apps that eat away on battery life and CPU while doing nothing more than simple searches.
My most beloved terminal tools (and terminal app):
Wezterm: I literally tried every terminal but Wezterm is the one that sticked with me because of its lua base. Lua is so easy to config and it’s so easy to make it your own.
Fish Shell: First I tried oh-my-zsh but Fish is so much more convenient to use. It is different but it feels more natural. Autocompletion of terminal commands… is so awesome.
Starship: Makes your terminal look nice.
Besides the terminal itself tools I use daily:
Yazi: It is so fast, it has preview, it is a charm to work with files.
fzf: Fuzzyfinder… no matter what you are looking for in your files, it will find it. If you combine it with fd you can literally delete rest files of deleted apps.
Neovim: hard to master but when you inherit all the commands it is a nice editor
Tree: Treelike file structure in terminal
Zoxide: it is a smarter cd command that remembers file paths for you.
Fastfetch: A neofetch clone. Look at the screenshot.
Besides those I use some vibe coded python tools for several teacher based needs.
