2025 is the year I left the "stock" dev stack.

Before

It had been a long time since I stopped adopting new tools and decided to stick with "the basics" found on most *nix distros. By basics, I mean:

• VS Code as my primary IDE.
• vim with a fairly basic configuration as my secondary text editor.
• Standard core utilities such as grep, ls, etc.

The reason for this was mostly due to the nature of my old job—hopping between multiple remote Linux appliances daily to troubleshoot or test code, sifting through tons of logs and files on a remote build machine, or sometimes having to live-debug during a customer escalation. For these types of workflows, it made sense to use tools that were universally available and to learn them as a power user. I just couldn't convince myself it was worth building muscle memory for tools like eza, ripgrep, and others if I had to use a totally different set of tools half the time.

After

Then I switched jobs, and there was nothing anchoring me to standard tools anymore. So, I decided to significantly change how I do things—partly because I believed newer tools offered more productivity gains and partly because I wanted to catch up with "what the cool kids" were using. Here's what I adopted at the beginning of 2025:

• eza – a modern replacement for ls.
• bat – a cat clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration.
• atuin – for smart shell history.
• alacritty – a fast, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator.
• fish – a friendly interactive shell.
• starship – a feature-loaded shell prompt.
• Zed – a new-ish IDE.
• dotfiles – for managing, well, dotfiles.

There are some tools that I want to adopt but haven't gotten around to yet:

• ripgrep – a faster replacement for grep.
• Raycast – a replacement for macOS Spotlight.
• zellij – a tmux replacement.

So far?

Around two months in, I still don't have the full muscle memory that I used to have, but productivity is definitely better. Also, most of the tools just look better—whether it's formatting, colors, or icons, the experience is nicer while also remaining lightweight.

I still have anxiety that I will slowly lose skills in the basic core utilities that I will absolutely have to use one cold rainy Friday night when production is down. So far, I can live with that.