My Terminal Setup

The macOS defaults are fine until you've used something better. Over time I've swapped out a handful of them for tools that are faster or just less annoying to use.

Ghostty

As you probably noticed from the image, my terminal of choice is Ghostty. I tried a lot of others before landing on it. iTerm2 felt bloated, Alacritty was fine but too minimal, Warp kept trying to be something I didn't ask for. Ghostty hits the right balance. Highly configurable, fast, and has been my daily driver since the beta.

Starship

Prompt configuration has a way of becoming its own project. Starship avoids that. I set it up once with the things I actually need (current directory, git branch, command duration) and haven't touched it since.

eza

I have eza aliased to ls so the switch is invisible. You only really notice it when you SSH into something and wonder why ls suddenly looks so ugly.

alias ls='eza -l --icons'
alias la='eza -l -a --icons'
alias ld='eza -l -D --icons'
alias ll='eza --icons'

zoxide

Smarter cd. I type part of a directory name and zoxide figures out where I mean. Took about a day to get used to it, and now typing out a full path feels like a punishment.

bat

bat is cat with syntax highlighting. Aliased to cat. It also shows git diff markers in the gutter, which comes up more often than I expected. I've had it installed for so long I forget it's not the default.

alias cat='bat'

fd

fd is find but I can actually remember how to use it. With find I was Googling the syntax every time. With fd I just type what I want. It also respects .gitignore by default, so searching a project doesn't mean wading through node_modules.

None of these tools are revolutionary on their own. But stacked together, they turn the terminal from something I tolerate into something I actually prefer over any GUI.