Largely because of Claude Code, the time I spend in the terminal has multiplied. Though even before that, I always had it open just in case. Not out of luxury, but because GUIs are so bad and laggy that sometimes the terminal is just much simpler.
I've really gotten into this topic out of scientific interest, though at a fairly casual level. There's such an endless pile of micro-utilities in this world that I'm definitely missing a lot, so I'm calling for people to share their life-critical settings and tools in the comments. Well, let me tell you a bit about my setup. Criticism is welcome.
You might not even know that the iTerm2 era has passed, as I didn't know a year ago. And maybe you're even using the stock macOS terminal (scary, very scary). So now there's a war worse than the browser wars. Out of all terminal emulators, I settled on WezTerm after trying Kitty, Ghostty, Alacritty, and Warp a little bit. The last one actually scares me for now, to be honest. And WezTerm seemed the most straightforward in a good sense, stable, and yet customizable (in Lua, of course, just to keep life interesting). Write what you like about your terminal app, by the way.
Next is the shell. I catch some flak for my decision not to use the built-in macOS zsh, but I'm used to fish. Syntax highlighting, amazing history search, convenient autocompletions and all that out of the box. Basically everything that in zsh you'd need to mess with ohmyzsh for. And I catch flak because 99% of guides assume the user has zsh.
However, neural networks explain perfectly how to rewrite configs from zsh to fish. And in general, remembering complex commands in 2025 isn't mandatory, you can just ask neural networks for them. The especially brave can open Claude Code at their home directory level and run any commands from it. I'm not one of those yet.
My set of utilities is pretty modest, but I think it's enough:
- lsd-rs/lsd as a replacement for ls - with different colors, icons and tons of other features
- sharkdp/bat as a replacement for cat - with syntax highlighting
- ajeetdsouza/zoxide as a replacement for cd - with search through already visited folders, ordered by frequency
- sxyazi/yazi as a file manager inside the terminal, because anything in the world is more convenient than Finder. And especially when you memorize the shortcuts.
- starship/starship - for prompt customization
- adriankarlen/bar.wezterm - bar with tabs and additional info for WezTerm The last two are configured to be super minimalist. Nothing but text tabs and a bright prompt so you can immediately see the boundary between commands.
And naturally, there's a keyboard shortcut for opening the terminal. As well as for several other most popular applications on the computer.
And what interesting stuff do you have? Don't suggest vim/nvim.