Hi! I don’t know if you’ve been following DHH’s recent rekindled love affair ❤️🔥 with the Terminal, but it is such a joy to see a tech thought leader sharing his excitement with multiplexers, Neovim, and Terminal user interfaces! This, along with many questions I’ve received over the past months asking about my setup, tooling, and general workflow, inspired me to create both a video (coming out today 👀) and a written blueprint that I’m sharing here: My Terminal BlueprintEvery setup is built with layers and different components, including an emulator, a prompt, tooling, hotkeys, and more. I’ll structure it from the ground up in a way that’s easy to follow and replicate or, better yet, use as a boilerplate to make it your own. An emulator makes all the differenceA terminal emulator is the native program giving you access to a shell prompt. DHH uses Alacritty, as you can see above. My terminal journey started with the (terrible) MacOS terminal. Then I used the popular iTerm2 for a long time. After that, I spent a year with Alacritty, tried Kitty, and finally fell in love with Wezterm. Wezterm, to me, has everything I want in an emulator:
One con is its poor native window management (or lack thereof), which I think most other options also struggle with. One project to watch is Ghostty by Mitchel Hashimoto (Hashicorp’s founder). The shell is how things are doneI’m using the popular ZSH, mainly because I started with the even more popular project - oh-my-zsh. It feels like the same relationship developers had when getting into Ruby because of Rails a decade ago… While I do think Fish has a lot to offer, I haven’t taken the time to properly explore it, so ZSH, coupled with the prompt I love, does everything I need: The PromptI covered my use of Starship in a video last year, and I’ve been LOVING it and have never looked back! Coming from oh-my-zsh, I find Starship faster, leaner, easier to set up and configure, and it does everything I need. It comes with beautifully easy-to-understand docs and is just a sweet completion to my terminal setup. The MultiplexerI don’t think Tmux needs an introduction. It’s my terminal Operating System, nothing less! Tmux is my terminal splitter, space manager, and it even lets me know about upcoming calendar meetings. It’s plugged with a session manager I built and tons of other configurations. So, here’s a video covering how I set it up from scratch, and another one covering my session manager! Tmux, as you may already know, is hosting my primary shell process: Neovim! The only editor you’ll ever need: NeovimVim/Nvim is another tool that needs no introduction. I’ve made so many videos about it that it’s really hard to pick just one, so here’s all of them. There’s too much to be said about the plugins I use and how I set it up, so I’ve decided to create a dedicated video coming out next month. CLI Tooling is just BETTERMost of my work that involves API communication, internal commands, managing files and folders, and even code management is done within the terminal. I found many modern alternatives to Unix native commands like If I had to pick one tool, there’s a very good chance I’d go with FZF. FZF makes everything accessible via a fuzzy picker. Whether it’s files, folders, command history, bits of code, everything becomes better using FZF. Even my Tmux session manager is built on top of an FZF feature. If you’re even an occasional terminal user, I can’t recommend it enough. TUIs are all the rage nowLastly, it’s important to mention the growing field of TUIs - terminal user interfaces. Users are slowly discovering the fun and efficient way to move through a terminal-based application, using Vim motions and native bindings, making everything quicker and better! Notable TUIs I’m using:
This pretty much sums it up. While there are MANY other tools and bindings I use, not to mention a split keyboard with macros and combos for better control (more on that is coming soon!), these are the basics. These are the tools I can’t live without, that shape the way I interact with the terminal, and through them, with other systems as well. I hope you found it useful. Please reply with any feedback or questions. Have a great weekend! |
Every once in a while I send hand picked things I've learned. Kind of like your filter to the tech internet. No spam, I promise!
Hi friends, Are you tired of juggling multiple apps for note-taking and writing? Many of us struggle to find a seamless system that combines powerful text editing with effective note organization. While popular note-taking apps offer fancy features, they often fall short for those who prefer a keyboard-centric, or should I say Vim-centric workflow. Most people resort to using dedicated note-taking applications like Obsidian, Notion, or even Apple notes. These tools are great for casual users,...
Hi friends, The Dotfiles Dilemma Ever felt like your computer settings are scattered everywhere? Those pesky dotfiles that control how your programs look and work can be a real headache to manage. The Old Way: Git and Stow Many of us have tried using Git to track changes in our dotfiles. Some even use Stow to create symlinks. But let's be honest – it's not always smooth sailing. Sometimes things don't line up right, and not every program plays nice with this setup. Why Traditional Methods...
Hey friends! Are you tired of juggling countless environment variables across different projects? Do you find yourself constantly tweaking your .zshrc or .bashrc with tokens, api keys or other project-specific variables? Well, I’ve got a game-changer for you! The Problem with Traditional .env Files We’ve all been there. You start a new project, set up a few environment variables in a .env file, and everything’s peachy. But as your project grows, so does your list of variables. Before you know...