The first time I saw someone navigate a terminal with fluency — no mouse, moving through files and processes at the speed of thought — I didn’t understand what I was looking at. It looked like typing nonsense and having things happen. It took me years to appreciate that the nonsense was a language.
This is about dotfiles: configuration files that live in your home directory and shape your terminal environment.
Why Bother
You could use VS Code with default settings and get on fine. But there’s something that happens when you spend time configuring your environment: it starts to feel like yours. The tools respond the way you expect them to. The keybindings match the patterns in your hands.
This is the terminal equivalent of a well-organised workshop. Everything in its place. Everything within reach.
My Setup
I use fish shell for sensible defaults and good autocompletion out of the box. tmux for splitting terminals and managing sessions. Neovim as my editor, with a configuration I’ve been accumulating for three years.
-- A snippet from my neovim config
vim.opt.relativenumber = true
vim.opt.scrolloff = 8
vim.opt.wrap = false
Keep your dotfiles in a Git repository. Use GNU Stow to manage symlinks. Start with one thing — maybe just your prompt — then see what else starts to itch.