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Terminal and shell
What HN commenters recommend, ranked by distinct recommenders. Under each: what people praise most and the most common caveat, or the strongest quote where there is no summary yet.
- 1.Loved for Agent workflows, Long-term reliability · Caveat Steep configuration
- 2.Loved for Speed, Agent workflows · Caveat iTerm2 switching
- 3.Loved for Multi-agent oversight, Tmux replacement · Caveat Limited plugins
- 4.Loved for Sane defaults, Persistent sessions · Caveat Copy and scrollback
- 5.Loved for Broad capability, LLM-friendly · Caveat Steep syntax
- 6.Loved for Format conversion, PDF via Typst · Caveat Docs and bloat
- 7.Loved for SSH client, Full Linux toolset · Caveat Small-screen input
- 8.Loved for Pipeline building block, Audio and music · Caveat YouTube breakage
- 9.Loved for Built-in kittens, Scriptability · Caveat Config-file setup
- 10.Loved for History search, Pipeable picker · Caveat Tab history sync
- 11.Loved for Speed, Agent tooling · Caveat Not preinstalled
- 12.Loved for Structured pipelines, Better than Bash · Caveat Not preinstalled
- 13.Loved for Good defaults, Long-term favorite · Caveat No history expansion
- 14.Loved for Daily driver, Fuzzy Ctrl-R · Caveat Bloat
- 15.Loved for AI agent workflows, tmux integration · Caveat Slower than Ghostty
- 16.Loved for Many backends, Mounting remotes · Caveat Config required
- 17.Loved for Daily driver, Available everywhere · Caveat Language footguns
- 18.Loved for Structured objects, Windows administration · Caveat Complexity
- 19.Loved for Multi-agent workflows, Project workspaces · Caveat macOS only
- 20.Loved for Better than vterm, Speed · Caveat Display glitches
- 21.Loved for Lua scripting, Versioned config · Caveat Slow development
- 22.Loved for Bad connections, Mobile use · Caveat No multiplexing
- 23.Loved for Backups and sync, SSH file transfer · Caveat Recent release bugs
- 24.Loved for Plugin ecosystem, Interactive editing · Caveat Bad defaults
- 25.Loved for Agent tooling, Shell scripting glue · Caveat Syntax learning curve
- 26.Loved for Terminal page fetching, Shell scripting · Caveat No CT checks
- 27.Loved for Sane defaults, Daily driver · Caveat AI bloat
- 28.Loved for Quick navigation, Daily habit · Caveat Index gaps
- 29.Loved for Multiplexer pairing, Low latency · Caveat Config-file setup
- 30.Loved for Pairs with ripgrep, Speed
- 31.Loved for Syntax highlighting, Automatic pager
- 32.Loved for Sensible defaults, Git aliases · Caveat Slow startup
- 33.Loved for Secrets loading, Nix integration
- 34.Loved for Simple and sufficient, Speed · Caveat Slow recursive scans
- 35.Loved for Attach and detach, Restores terminal state · Caveat Repainting bugs
- 36.Loved for Pairs with tmux, Well liked
- 37.Loved for Daily driver, Settings GUI · Caveat Speed and latency
- 38.Loved for AI agent friendly, Pleasant to use · Caveat Telemetry
- 39.Loved for Simple, good enough, Cmd+F search · Caveat Slow rendering
- 40.the shell, awk, sed and other commands (Chapter 12) were invaluable
- 41.the shell, awk, sed and other commands (Chapter 12) were invaluable
- 42.I mostly use TUI markdown viewers that render the document via ANSI escape codes beautifully. Check out glow project.
- 43.
- 44.I love this but I can’t figure out how to have my two computers have remote control sessions at once
- 45.I liked using this software last time I was doing that to my ancient phone and have had zero issues using the preset lists to disable stuff.
- 46.I always end up back at "st" though. It is fast enough for my purposes and does just about exactly what I want and not more.
- 47.Using things like k9s / btop / lazygit / lazydocker helm / stern
- 48.when I'm examining experiment data I use the closest modern tool to Lotus: https://www.visidata.org/
- 49.You can also just use the system console with tmux or GNU screen
- 50.I use neovim and k9s mostly and those are such amazinng tools
- 51.This is pretty awesome, and at a $3 price point is an auto purchase for me!
- 52.The Windows Terminal (and no, not what opens running Command Line or Powershell, it is a different application
- 53.This has quickly become my favorite TUI text editor
- 54.Check out Noctalia, it supports multiple Wayland compositors
- 55.I would strongly recommend turning on most of clippy's lints if you want to learn rust.
- 56.With static libs or even better, e. g. statically compiled busybox, I don't have that issue
- 57.
- 58.this foundational software which I use every. single. day.
- 59.Agents I use have no trouble with gh or glab or tea.
- 60.I love the fact that it's a lightweight and verbose script.
- 61.I recently configured it with Quickshell[1], and couldn't be happier.
- 62.the excellent entr https://eradman.com/entrproject/
- 63.I am running Niri with Dank Material Shell, and it is excellent
- 64.I use ZX for this - it's basically JS/TS with some extra stuff that makes it good for shell scripts.
- 65.Check out zsh-bench⁽¹⁾ for a more authoritative approach, including first prompt lag, first command lag, input lag and exit lag.
- 66.I hand Simon's `llm` command lone tool access to its own todo list and read/write access to the cwd
- 67.I use chafa extensively, and it really is the best tool for terminal graphics in my opinion.
- 68.100mb more ram and 1% more battery drain for an OS aiming to be a daily driver is something that's worth it.