My terminal setup in 2025 (and the 8 tools that matter)

I live in a terminal. Not in a performative, look-at-my-ricing way — it's simply where I'm fastest. Here's the current state of the setup, and the small sharp tools that carry the most weight.

The foundation

WezTerm + tmux + zsh. WezTerm because GPU rendering makes scrollback buttery and the config is Lua (so is my editor config, and consistency is cozy). tmux because sessions-per-project means I never rebuild context after a restart.

# the holy trinity of modern shell ergonomics
eval "$(starship init zsh)"
eval "$(zoxide init zsh)"
source <(fzf --zsh)

The eight that matter

1. ripgrep — the fastest way to answer "where did I define that?"
2. fd — find without the man page.
3. fzf — ctrl-r is now a superpower.
4. eza — ls with git status baked in.
5. bat — cat, but with syntax highlighting.
6. zoxide — z proj and I'm home.
7. lazygit — staging individual hunks without tears.
8. jq — because every API returns JSON eventually.

Neovim, briefly

Treesitter for highlighting, LSP for everything else, telescope for finding, and a colorscheme I've tweaked so many times it qualifies as original art. The whole config is in my dotfiles repo.

The real trick isn't any single tool — it's that they're all composable, all scriptable, and all muscle memory by now. Invest in your dotfiles. Future you is lazy and grateful.