Tools I keep coming back to
Not a "best tools" list. Just the ones that survived more than a month on my machines, which is a much smaller set than it used to be.
On the server
rg replaced my use of grep almost entirely — the defaults are what
I would have configured anyway, and the speed changes how I work. fzf
is the other one; it's a fuzzy finder, but what I actually use it for is history
search, which has saved me an embarrassing amount of typing.
tmux I resisted for a long time because I thought a single terminal
was fine. It wasn't. Losing a session to a dropped connection once is enough.
For text
I write in plain markdown and keep it in a directory. Whatever editor is around is fine. The important part turned out to be not the editor but having one place everything goes.
Things I stopped using
- Docker on small machines — the overhead never paid for itself at my scale
- Complex shell prompt frameworks — a two-line prompt is enough
- Any tool that needs a daemon running just to tell me something I could read in a file
The pattern
Almost everything that lasted does one thing, has sane defaults, and doesn't need configuring to be useful. Tools that need a config file before they do anything tend not to survive.