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Comment by staindk | Hacker News Reader

Some good points made in the article.

If you use the terminal for any appreciable amount of time I heavily suggest getting fzf (even if just for the search).

Tmux is great if you need any more than 1 terminal window open at once - just remap some of its hotkeys to stuff that make more sense for you (e.g. I use "Alt + |" to split vertically and "Alt + -" (minus) to split horizontally).

Man pages are generally about 500 times longer than I need them to be (just help me do a basic curl/SSH copy/... please) - so I have cheat.sh aliased which helps a lot with simple "how do I use X".

Aliases in general are insanely useful. If you're a fzf search whiz they may not help you as much but seeing people type common commands out multiple times a day... makes me happy knowing I have my alias bank.

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> Tmux is great if you need any more than 1 terminal window open at once - just remap some of its hotkeys to stuff that make more sense for you (e.g. I use "Alt + |" to split vertically and "Alt + -" (minus) to split horizontally).

Nice tip! While I don't mind the default Tmux keybindings (<prefix> " and prefix % for horizontal and vertical splits), one thing that used to annoy me early on was how new panes would default to the directory where Tmux was originally launched, rather than inheriting the current working directory. Fortunately it was easy to fix with a few lines of code in ~/.tmux.conf:

  bind '"' split-window -c "#{pane_current_path}"
  bind % split-window -h -c "#{pane_current_path}"
  bind c new-window -c "#{pane_current_path}"

This ensures that while splitting a pane with <prefix> " or <prefix> %, or while creating a new window with <prefix> c, the new shell inherits the working directory of the previous pane. This small tweak saved me countless unnecessary "cd" commands.

second this. huge game changer. should be default.

> one thing that used to annoy me early on was how new panes would default to the directory where Tmux was originally launched

Not just current dir, but the whole env:

   export SECRET=oops  # could be silent if you use e.g direnv
   tmux                # first one => start daemon

Then another unrelated terminal:

   tmux
   env | grep SECRET  # oops

`fzf` is so universally useful I just recommend it by default to everyone I work with now who touches a terminal. The new fuzzy finding shortcuts it creates for shell history and switching directories alone makes it worth it, even if you never call `fzf` itself, as I recorded back in my tutorial eons ago. [1]

[1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/fzf

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