Terminal and Command Line Guides

Every guide on the site, grouped by what you’re actually trying to get done. None of them are a tour of the man page: they’re the working setup, the config worth stealing, and the specific places each tool quietly lies to you.

Set up the shell

The one-off afternoon that pays for itself every day afterwards.

Starship: customise your shell prompt — the default prompt tells you nothing and looks dreadful doing it. Install, wire in, and a starter starship.toml that doesn’t bin the eighty modules you didn’t know you had.
Zsh without the bloat — history, completion, autosuggestions and syntax highlighting in about forty lines of .zshrc, with no framework and no mystery.
Manage your dotfiles with nothing but git — the bare-repo method: no symlinks, no extra tooling, and the answer to what happens when the laptop dies.
Git config: the settings worth stealing — a .gitconfig that stops pull and push nagging, draws conflicts with the missing half left in, and picks the right email for work repositories by itself.
direnv: per-project environment variables — an .envrc that loads on cd and unloads on the way out, secrets kept in an untracked .env, and why an edit locks you out until you say yes again.

Live in the terminal

Technique rather than setup. These are the ones that compound.

Terminal keyboard shortcuts worth learning — readline line editing, history search and process control, plus the tab and pane keys for each terminal.
Getting started with tmux — sessions that survive a closed lid and a dead VPN, windows, panes, copy mode, and a config that fixes the defaults worth fixing.
tmux cheat sheet — the same thing as a reference rather than a tutorial: every default binding in tables, plus the copy-mode keys that surprise every Vim user.
Truecolor in tmux, SSH and Vim — why the gradient goes muddy inside tmux or over SSH, what TERM and terminfo genuinely control, and which layer to fix.
The SSH config file — named hosts, per-host keys, multiplexing, ProxyJump, and the first-match-wins rule that catches absolutely everyone.

Tools worth an afternoon

Single tools deep enough to earn a guide of their own.

fzf: fuzzy finding on the command line — the three key bindings, the search syntax nobody reads, preview windows, and ready-made recipes.
ripgrep (rg) cheat sheet and guide — the flags worth learning, the four reasons it can’t see a file you can, search and replace, and why -r isn’t recursive.
jq: parsing JSON on the command line — filters, .[], select, @tsv, and the six gotchas that cost everybody an afternoon exactly once.
Bash strict mode — what set -euo pipefail actually does, the four places errexit quietly gives up, and a header worth pasting into everything.

Looking for kit rather than technique? The tools and gear roundups cover the terminal emulator, the font and the keyboard — the three things you’ll stare at and prod for years.