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Comment by outlore | Hacker News Reader

I am curious to ask others here, are there other low-config alternative tools like Fish that, looking back, now seem like a no brainer? Ghostty is a recent example, Helix seems like another. I’d love to know about other tools people are using that have improved or simplified their lives.

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Agree with you on helix. I love it.

Atuin for improved history search.

Starship for an improved shell prompt.

zoxide - better cd

ripgrep - better grep

just - a command runner. I put project specific commands/scripts in there so I don’t have to remember.

All of these are indispensable for me.

fd a better find is one I like.

imho starship is really just eye candy for the shell; it's not necessarily an actually improved shell prompt if you're on a "modern" shell like fish (a shell for the '90s!) or if you've put effort into customizing your shell experience with any of the other shells.

I’m on zsh and it’s definitely an upgrade for me.

I want to say though, great work on this migration! Really fantastic work that others can learn from when they try a similar migration.

CD is builtin, there's no better cd.

+2 for ripgrep. Modern PCRE regex with lighting speed.

I run into so many issues trying to adapt the regex in my head (usually PCRE) into the older grep and egrep style.

+1 for atatuin

I use and love all of these, thanks for sharing

Chezmoi was a complete workflow changer for me. https://www.chezmoi.io/ Let's me manage/synchronize my configs between systems. It has built in variables and scripting support so you can ignore sections of files or specific sections of files on certain systems, write specific configs for specific systems based on hostname or OS. It's a bit of work to get an understanding of, but incredibly powerful once you do.

Whenever I setup a new system now, I install chezmoi, clone my comfig repo and then initialize it and it uses the chezmoi scripts to automatically installs all my programs and copies in the needed config files.

Nice, I’ve been using dotter, will have to check out chezmoi

fish instead of zsh, Helix instead of Vim (or Micro instead of Pico/nano), Typst instead of LaTeX

fastmod is a better sed.

mise, uv, ruff, starship is my current list.

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