I setup my terminal for max productivity | Hacker News Reader

I setup my terminal for max productivity

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36 pointsjordancutler27 comments

> 1 hour/day efficiency gain = 1 month saved per year

The idea that some terminal tweaks (theme, shell, tooling, etc) can save you an hour a day is pretty outlandish. It also doesn't seem to be accounting for all the time setting things up, configuring it, debugging it, and learning how to use it (e.g flags for ripgrep when you do want hidden files, key bindings for mcfly, etc)

My alternative approach would be to be _aware_ of the tools in a given space, but start with the dumbest, simplest workflow and only introduce a new tool when the friction of not-using it crosses some annoyance threshold.

I say this as someone who lives in a terminal (using fish, atuin, Zellij, Helix, etc), but adopted those tools one by one as made sense.

That is pretty much my approach to improving my workflow also. My setup looks like I spend all my time configuring and tweaking things, but really at this point I spend somewhere on the order of a couple hours a year onboarding new tools. I have asymptotically approached an ideal configuration for myself, and as I get closer and closer, I spend less and less time configuring.

Why would you pick a path ripe with annoyances when you can adopt a more pleasant workflow where those annoyances are already fixed?

There are a lot of ways one can answer this question:

- Because the base path isn't necessarily full of annoyances, just things that may not jive with your workflow. But you won't know that until you run up against it

- "More pleasant workflows" usually comes at the cost of additional or more featureful/complicated tooling. The cognitive overhead or time spent setting up/learning these tools might dwarf the savings you get

- Adopting a premade package of pleasant workflows might include a lot of cruft you don't need. Starting from "scratch" means you understand why you added all the things you did

1. we do know that it is because at this point generations of other people have shared their experience about how bad the defaults are. Why ignore it?

2. how is this different vs. what you're suggesting? You're just adding this complicated tooling piecemeal after getting annoyed instead of before

3. Just ignore cruft until it annoys you? What's the downside of it otherwise existing? And understanding can be gained from reading the docs/blogs like this, for example, "zsh-syntax-highlighting - Highlights the commands you type to tell you if its valid or not." Does this not answer "why"?

This is how I did my emacs config. Start with basically vanilla, and about once a month I'd pick the one thing that annoyed me the most over the last month and fix it.

Solved a problem where I'd go on binges of installing and configuring 18 packages, and then not take the time to learn any one of them very well. Generating a lot of time spent reading docs and looking up keybinds when trying to work.

A couple of these tools—the git plugin for ohmyzsh and SCM Breeze)—are intended to make it easier to use git commands.

For people interested in these kinds of tools, I recommend trying out magit with emacs. In addition to also providing git command abbreviations, magit’s interface makes it easy to see the git status with automatic updates. It’s also a nice reason to learn emacs for anyone curious about its popularity.

Some screenshots of the interface are at: https://magit.vc/screenshots/

As a config addict, I fully recognize that thr time I spend looking for new tools and tweaking my configs isn't exactly "productive". But its a hobby that synergizes very nicely with my career and generally has the side effect of increasing my enjoyment at work (and thus, the amount of time I want to dedicate to it). There's obviously a balance yo be struck here but I think that config as a hobby can be very rewarding.

As a chronic optimizer, I ironically get anxious about time wasted optimizing. Thinking of it as a hobby helps.

Not to be a debbie-downer: but where would you gain an hour a day from this..? Sounds to me like you’d work an hour extra from tweaking and enjoying your tools.

Strange. Setting up the terminal - to escape from the terminal.

    # Open up zshrc file to edit it
    alias addalias='code ~/.zshrc'

Also, tmux is a huge productivity win, so I encourage the author to investigate it. But at the same time, the article seems mis-titled: max productivity has not yet been achieved; this is still fairly beginner/intermediate.

I'm a fan of: ``` alias editrc="vi ~/.zshrc && source ~/.zshrc" ``` Which waits until you exit to reload, saving you a command.

I totally missed the fact that he missed tmux, it is such low hanging fruit…

I don’t think it is possible to save an hour per day by tweaking your terminal. But having yesterday’s tmux sessions still around is a nice perk in the morning. No need to stumble around my filesystem while my brain is still absorbing the caffine.

> Install iTerm2. This terminal application allows much more customization than the default Terminal application that comes with Mac’s.

Install WezTerm. This terminal application allows much much more customization as it uses a lua configuration language (and is also x-platform, so you can justify investing even more time into improving your productivity as that will pay off on every platform!)

This will be a more controversial one, but I do find Amazon’s CodeWhisperer tool (the command line version, formerly Fig) very useful. It provides really, really good suggestions - for example I type ‘yarn s’ and it shows all the yarn commands starting with s, including custom package.json scripts in my project.

You know, this is great and all but I wonder if this guy is going to write in about 7 years to “just accept the defaults cause you are always going to ssh into a machine with bash and no color, setting up a pretty local machine is like adding flair to your server apron”

https://www.cinemablend.com/new/TGI-Fridays-Got-Rid-Flair-Be...

https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/

I actually seem to use most of the tools listed in the article. Not oh-my-zsh though. I use prezto.

For me, the most bang for buck is using zsh history search with fzf. It's like a second brain. I have command line history going back years and can pull anything up by typing few snippets of text..

My dotfiles for some productivity hacks - https://github.com/vs4vijay/dotfiles/blob/master/.zshrc

These are actually pretty good. I use zsh / oh-my-zsh / starship and fzf for my history and these are great. I'm not as maximalist as this but the minimalist config doesn't give me that much utility.

as framed in the introduction of this article, https://xkcd.com/1205 is hard to ignore whenever i'm spending time configuring a tool in the name of "productivity"

but i just got nushell properly set up and i've realised that the table doesn't capture the whole dynamic: there's more to work than time trade-offs when new tools enable entirely new types of tasks.

nushell makes working with structured data fun and so i've started benchmarking my code and quickly doing performance analysis - something i was rarely doing before.

you can still ultimately reduce this down to time saved, i suppose, but as a person who's generally skeptical of terminal tweaking as procrastination in disguise, i can highly recommend giving nushell a go.

I don't know if it's gotten better in the meantime but if you edit text in the terminal, Kitty and Alacritty are much quicker emulators than iTerm.

Saving hours is the wrong way of looking at this sort of optimisation. The point is to improve the hours you do spend in the terminal.

Ditching oh-my-zsh in favor of powerlevel10k resulted in one of the biggest terminal speedups for me.

Setup is a noun, set up is the corresponding verb.

Adopting some of these, thank you!

I kind of converged during my studies (5 - 10 years ago) to a setup with arch+zsh+vim+awesome and I love it.

But recently I switched to fish shell which seems to be a lot nicer in terms of setup and default options. Also a faster launch time.

Also I'm a bit disappointed because I noticed that oh-my-zsh messed up my history file and I lost 300k shell entries (75% of my history) and because of an unlucky backup incident a lot of my history is lost forever :(

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