The Tools That Stuck

A month into the Framework 13 experiment. Time to take stock.

Which of the modern CLI tools actually stuck? Which ones am I reaching for daily?

The Survivors #

These earned permanent spots in muscle memory:

fish for interactive shell. The autocompletions alone justify it. Tab through command history with context. Syntax highlighting as you type. Sane defaults without configuration sprawl.

yazi for file management. Terminal file manager that doesn’t feel like punishment. Image previews. Bulk operations. Keyboard-driven but not hostile.

ripgrep (rg) for searching. grep, but fast. Really fast. Respects .gitignore by default. The tool I reach for many times a day.

fd for finding files. find, but with human syntax. fd "\.md$" instead of find . -name "*.md". Small thing. Matters.

bat for viewing files. cat with syntax highlighting and git integration. See what changed at a glance.

eza for listing. ls, but with git status, better colors, sensible defaults. Tree view built in.

zoxide for navigation. cd that learns. z node0 takes me to /home/cps/node0 because that’s where I go when I type those letters.

LazyVim for editing. Neovim with opinions. Fast, configured, extensible. Replaced years of VSCode muscle memory in weeks.

lazygit for version control. TUI for git that makes complex operations visible. Interactive rebasing without fear.

The Pattern #

Notice something? These tools share traits:

Speed. Written in Rust, Go, or well-optimized C. No startup lag. No waiting.

Defaults. Sane out of the box. Minimal configuration needed to be useful.

Composability. They play well with others. Pipe ripgrep into bat. Use fd with xargs. Unix philosophy, modern execution.

Respect for existing knowledge. fd feels like find. rg feels like grep. They’re better, not alien.

What Didn’t Stick #

Some experiments didn’t survive:

Helix (editor). Tried it. Interesting modal model. But LazyVim’s plugin ecosystem won.

nnn (file manager). Fast and minimal. But yazi’s previews and operations were worth the extra weight.

broot (file tree). Good, but zoxide + fd covered the use cases.

Not failures. Just not winners for my workflow.

The Stack Now #

Shell:     fish + fisher + fzf
Editor:    LazyVim (Neovim)
Files:     yazi + eza + fd
Search:    ripgrep + fzf
View:      bat
Navigate:  zoxide
Git:       lazygit + git-delta
Monitor:   btop

Everything plays together. Fish completions know about my tools. Fzf integrates with everything. LazyVim has Telescope for fuzzy finding.

It’s not about individual tools. It’s about the system they form.

Why It Matters #

This isn’t tool fetishism. It’s about removing friction.

Every time I don’t wait for a slow tool, that’s cognitive space preserved. Every time a command does what I expect, that’s flow maintained. Every time I don’t have to remember arcane syntax, that’s energy saved for the actual work.

The tools that stuck are the ones that get out of the way.

Sovereignty Connection #

All of these are open source. All run locally. None phone home. None require accounts.

If any of them disappeared tomorrow, I could fork them, replace them, or adapt. No vendor lock-in. No subscription. No asking permission.

The tools serve the work. The work is sovereign.

Part 3 of the Node0 build series. Next: The Storage Foundation, deploying the storage layer that everything builds on.