My history with Unix goes back a long ways – nearly 40 years at this point, which is somewhat humbling – and one thing that I’ve always kind of held to during that time is that I should stick to using tools that I can reliably expect to be present on any system I’m using.

So, the first text editor I learned way back in the 80s was vi, and that editor is still present on every single Unix based system I’ve ever logged in to, so I’ve never really been tempted to learn nano.  At some point it got renamed to vim which did confuse me a little bit but I just alias vi=’vim’ and then I am back in a safe place.

Point of order:  I can’t be said to ever have really learned vi.  But I can get around.

Anyway.  A side effect of this is that, traditionally, I don’t mess around with installing extra STUFF.  I certainly don’t dig deep into personalization, and I’ve always kind of looked at things like completion helpers with a sort of suspicion and disdain.  My terminal sessions get a simple monospaced font installed and the text gets set to green-on-black as God intended and that is how Things Should Be.

…until a couple of weeks ago, when I had to work with a customer via a zoom session and got to watch him doing things in the terminal that left me gobsmacked.

Fast forward to today and I have been, as the kids say, ricing the heck out of my systems.

Well.  I’m not sure what I’m doing really counts as that.  Mostly it’s been installing utilities like eza, fd, fzf, bat and ripgrep, then finally figuring out the difference between .zshenv, .zprofile and .zshrc and what should go in each of them, making XDG-compliant directories in $HOME even though macOS really doesn’t use them by default, and theming everything I can with the rather pleasant “catppuccin” color scheme.  I think that last is the only thing that’s really “ricing” though I can’t be said to understand the language of the youths on any given day.

Oh, and vim!

vim has colors now!  They’re oddly muted in this screenshot, but it’s quite pretty in person.  I’ve even installed PLUGINS for vim, which doesn’t gel at all with my previous stance on keeping everything vanilla so I don’t get reliant on things that may not be present if I log into a random system.

I’m half considering – and I can scarcely believe I’m saying this – switching to neovim.

And even if I do feel dirty about the whole thing, I have to admit that it’s easier to remember

fd .log -X bat --show-range -50:

than it is to remember

find ~+ -name "*.log" -exec bat --show-range -50: {} \;

and I know this is easier because, despite having run one version of another of the find command above many times over the years, I still initially forgot the trailing \; when I was typing this up.

There’s only been one little problem.  The utility that seems to be the go-to for theming your terminal prompt and making it pretty is called “starship” and for a person of a certain vintage that leads to having a song stuck in your head All.  The.  Time.

Specifically “We Built This City”.

However, one positive side effect of this is that, after four decades, I have finally gotten fed up enough with not understanding the lyrics that I actually LOOKED THEM UP.