Every few weeks, someone asks me which terminal they should switch to. The question usually arrives shaped like this: “iTerm or tmux or cmux or something else — which is best for a developer in 2026?” I’ve started giving the same annoying answer: the question is wrong. Not in a clever-internet-person way. Wrong in a …
A few months ago I timed myself during a typical development day. Not the coding — just the overhead. Waiting for builds. Re-signing a provisioning profile that expired without warning. Copy-pasting the same networking boilerplate into a new feature. Tapping through 12 screens to test one change. Switching between Xcode, Safari (for docs), and Terminal …
I spent three years tweaking my terminal. Custom oh-my-zsh theme. Fourteen plugins. A .zshrc file so long it took noticeable seconds to open a new tab. I’d invested so much time configuring that I convinced myself all of it was essential. Then one day I had to set up a fresh machine. And I realized: …
I once heard a developer say he lost thousands of notes overnight — not from a crash, but from a pricing change. The SaaS note app he’d been using for years moved his tier behind a paywall. He exported everything as HTML, but proprietary formatting doesn’t travel well. Half his notes were garbled. Internal links? …
