Ask HN: What's your terminal and shell setup?

Currently using Terminator when on Ubuntu and iTerm2 on my macbook. Always with zsh + oh-my-zsh plus a handful of plugins and aliases.

Curious to know what the real terminal and shell wizards are up to.

Lately shell interactions have felt very slow and archaic without some kind of AI assistance now that I've become so used to having it when coding with Copilot. I've seen and tried some of the available AI shell tools but haven't liked any yet. Just typing command descriptions and waiting for the AI generated command doesn't feel like the right model. Literally just using copilot in a context where I could execute its output would probably be a better experience. If I remember correctly, when playing with Emacs there was one of the terminal options where the output and command line were in a single buffer and hitting enter on the last line would execute the command there. So I'm thinking that if there's a copilot plugin for Emacs and that terminal option, then combining the two might be pretty nice.

4 points | by monroewalker 241 days ago

8 comments

  • gregjor 241 days ago
    Blink shell on iPad Pro, tmux, plain bash with a few aliases, vim with few plugins. No AI, no shell plugins, no junk on the screen to make it into a Christmas lights display. If your "shell interactions" feel slow try unloading some of the baggage. If you find the shell "archaic" try to reframe that as tried and tested and well-understood.

    The beauty of using the command line shell comes from the simplicity of plain text and direct interaction with the tools, not from trying to create a GUI experience or polluting it with Copilot assistance.

    I don't know about your setup with emacs, but both vim and bash can execute a line displayed in the terminal without adding anything to them.

  • marssaxman 241 days ago
    I wouldn't call myself a "wizard", but I do spend every work day in a terminal and have done so for many years. There is nothing fancy about my setup: I use gnome terminal, bash, and my own little editor `ozette`, every setting basically default.

    I have not yet tried Copilot, nor felt much curiosity about it; bulk generation of likely-incorrect code I don't really understand is not a service I can imagine much use for.

  • surrTurr 241 days ago
    mostly using tmux + zsh configured via dotfiles in a git repo[1]; zsh offers some great plugins, for example fzf-tab[2]. My opinion is to not overcook it, a shell should be fairly lightweight and minimal.

    In terms of AI tools in the terminal, I've also tried a few, but nothing stuck so far...

    [^1]: https://github.com/AlexW00/.config [^2]: https://github.com/Aloxaf/fzf-tab

  • sam2911 241 days ago
    - I use normal ubuntu terminal with tmux(super useful stuff). - For shell I use fish + oh-my-fish (I feel it is better than zsh).
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    • monroewalker 241 days ago
      I gave fish an honest try but ultimately just could not make it work for me. I forget what ended up being the nail in the coffin.. possibly the lack of multiline strings or some heredoc alternative. https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/540. That or I ran into compatibility issues with existing scripts. Which I think also happened.
  • stop50 241 days ago
    Konsole + zsh + zcomet

    Months ago i used zplug, but its not developed anymore and zcomet is much faster, since it compiles the files.

  • d3Xt3r 240 days ago
    I use Kitty as a terminal (on Linux) and fish as a shell (on both Linux and macOS). No AI (why do you need AI? Just use `tldr` or `--help`).

    Kitty is GPU accelerated and has excellent support for displaying images in the terminal, using the Kitty graphics protocol. It also has its own keyboard protocol which works around many limitations you'd normally encounter with modkeys and TUI apps.

    Also waiting to check out GhosTTY, which is supposed to be super fast (comes out next month).

    As for the shell, I too hsed zsh in the past, but I switched away from zsh due to how slow and bloated it became.

    fish is fast, and stuff like oh-my* is completely optional, because fish has many of the features zsh users would normally install manually.

    The only plugins I use in fish are fisher (a fish package manager) and tide (a really fast, customisable asynchronous prompt).

  • torunar 241 days ago
    xfce4-terminal + bash. The only tweak for the terminal is a custom light theme, the only tweak for the shell is a custom PS1 to show current git branch and time.
  • johncoltrane 241 days ago
    Bash in Terminal.app on macOS, with a bunch of rc files that have been evolving with me over many years. My own terminal palette. My own colorscheme in Vim. Fira Mono.

    And no "AI" bullshit whatsoever.

    [-]