Terminal apps that can make your life easier.

Agentic coding has made everyone developing with AI, work with the terminal like it's the early 80s. I mean, would you believe a time traveller visiting 2001 telling you that a quarter of a century later AI would be better at generating code than you are and that the most popular tools for agentic coding would be terminal apps?

A lot of people have embraced the change and might have gone a little bit overboard with what you can do with a TUI app but that's just a phase until we finally have more mature GUI agentic IDEs.

I have already switched to Conductor and Superconductor for most my agentic coding but a terminal pane is always open and ready to go in these apps. Ghostty is still a keyboard shortcut away as I still use the terminal of a lot of other coding and research tasks.

Since I expect the terminal to be big part of our coding sessions, I wanted to share a few lesser-known apps that have made my life so much easier. These are free open-source little utilities that will make you wonder why they don't come built-in with all shells.

Zoxide + fzf: Faster folder switching

One of the most frequent actions on the terminal is switching to the right folder. Zoxide remembers the paths you visit most often and learns from your patterns to make this so much faster. You cd to a folder at least once, e.g. cd ~/Workspace/MyProjectABC, zoxide picks this up, and next time you can simply type z and a few letters of the path like z ab and zoxide's algorithm will find the closest match and immediately take you there. It's spectacularly good at finding the right match.

fzf takes this a step further: instead of having zoxide take you to the folder you most likely wanted to go, fzf produces an interactive list of possible options based on zoxide's matching algorithm. Simply type zi and some letters of the path and hit the enter key. For example zi ab will get you a list of paths containing these letters sorted by how likely they are to be where you want to go.

zoxide: zoxide.org/
fzf: junegunn.github.io/fzf/

Atuin: Better access to your command history

Remembering previous terminal commands or trying to find a command that you previously entered using the terminal is tedious. Atuin keeps track of the commands that you type plus additional context and builds a database that you can instantly access interactively with a press of a key (the up-arrow key by default).

Instead of stepping through each command one-by-one, you get a beautiful list of previous commands that is both searchable and editable. I still don't understand how this is not the standard terminal experience or at least a configurable option.

atuin: atuin.sh

Starship: Make your system prompt useful

The default prompt is boring and doesn't really do much. What if you could use that space to show useful information like the current branch, available tooling, time spent in interactive sessions like claude code or codex?

Well, that's pretty much what Starship does. It lets you add a variaty modules to your prompt to show all kind of relevant information about the session and current folder. The modules are customisable visually and functionally and it's the best use of empty terminal space I can think of. I highly recommend installing a Nerdfont.

starship: starship.rs

Of course, I've merely scratched the surface of what these apps can do. They come with tons of customisation and additional functionality worth exploring. I hope you find these utilities useful. If you do, spread the word and support the creators. I'm not affiliated in any way with these projects, just a grateful supporter.

Until next time.