So the latest distraction I have indulged in, much to my chagrin as I’d actually like to achieve something is redoing my day to day desktop toolchain.
Terminal decline
iTerm was the rock of my desktop but I kept feeling it wasn’t delivering. Enter Tabby, which I forgive for being an Electron app because it’s pretty quick and has a UI for preferences. It also looks super slick which is nice when you are staring at these things all day. Big plus was the integrated Serial terminal mode in the profile/connections view, pulling .ssh connections in and handling a lot of odder characters well. So far so good, biggest problem is undoing the muscle memory of command space it for a terminal… Talking about muscle memory, Tabby is on Windows and Linux too, so thats neat.
Digging through the terminals available, I was struck by the number of terminals with bare config files and no settings editor support out there. I mean, I know people like their command lines but forcing folk to use config files to configure what is at heart a GUI application. Support both the config file and a UI for the config file.
Retaking the command line
Aaaaanyway, next up for changes was my command line itself. I was sticking with zsh for no real good reason other than its mac default status, and having it decorated with Starship for a rich prompt. And the change up it installing Atuin which is a super-power enabled shell history for all your shells. I haven’t turned on it’s cross-machine cloud encrypted sharing mode yet, but basically cursoring up is now a different experience, as it shows you your history in a filterable view. We’ll see how that settles in too.
Exit Stage Manager Left
Getting turned off, at least on the desktop/laptops is Stage Manager. It’s a lovely idea and I can see how it maps out and onto the Vision Pro and the like, but it’s not built for people who have shit-tons of Windows on shit-tons of Apps. It’s too easy to find yourself just digging around somewhere else to find that window.
What’s taking its place? Well, I’m checking out Rectangle and Rectangle Pro at the moment. The Pro has the edge with its window throwing antics, but we’ll see if that’s natural enough going forward. Both apps seem to nail the arrangement thing and if I ever do go back to Stage Manager, Rectangle knows how to leave space for that too.
Window switching has become yet another thing I rely on Raycast for. Turns out it had a window selection dialog hiding on Option-Tab which was being hidden by another switcher app. Turning that other app off. I’d already turned off Alt-Tab, a previous candidate for the switcher job as it really didn’t handle Stage Manager previews well (Hey, Apple sort that out eh? Some API for unmolested window thumbnails?). Anyway, the window switching isn’t as fancy but it is far more effective right now.
Big up Raycast
Raycast is just a bag of solid usefulness and next up on my list of things I should really do is build a Raycast extension to show and control my DoNotDisturb panels. (Sidenote, picked up the app again and am working on making the watch control more reliable before adding in some functional controls for displaying some {checks notes} cool shit).
So that’s the retooling so far, but I’m really thinking I’m up for more. Let me know (on wherever you see this linked-to on social media) what tools you think I should look at.
(PS. Follow up to the isolating the home devices post - There is now a desktop iMac back on the desk but mostly because there was nowhere to put the venti-Intel based beast… you will know it by its quiet burbley fans.)