I spend more time today than ever before interacting with terminal windows, which is something I don’t think my early 90s self would have believed. Back then, poor MS-DOS was the staid whipping boy of the industry, and graphical environments seemed poised to render text interfaces obsolete.

However, as it turns out, the command line remains a versatile tool for many tasks. A mouse-driven interface essentially reduces the user to pointing and grunting at the computer, while the command line allows precise instructions using words. This finally dragged me off Windows in 2007 and onto the Macintosh side.

These days, I run three different operating systems: MacOS for my desktop, Windows on a gaming PC, and Linux for headless tasks. The fish shell is my default on my Mac, while bash remains my preference when logged into Linux. Customizing my environment to fit my needs has been a rewarding process.

One of my favorite things in the terminal: a timer function that times each command and appends it to the prompt. This gives me an idea of how long commands took to run, useful for absentminded admins like myself who leave terminal sessions up for days at a time.