[Leonard_of_Q]

I sort of get the appeal of fine-tuning the terminal environment to perfection but after fiddling with such things for many years - decades - I ended up using mostly stock settings with a very few changes. The advantage of that approach is that I feel at home just about anywhere instead of just on my one or few customised systems. My customisations mostly consist of a local /bin directory with a few hundred scripts (wc -l now shows 263) I made over the years which I dump in a new environment plus a few additions to .bashrc (yes, bash, not one of the fancy replacements (zsh, fish, oil, ...) which are supposed to be better but in reality just end up being different) to set custom paths etc.

[saysjonathan]

I landed on near the same thing. I also went too far the other way at various points: ed as editor, weirder shells (posix sh, rc, es, rush (ruby shell), pdksh), suckless everything (even on MacOS, where possible). I found my healthy balance between using more modern tools and learning the defaults to avoid too much configuration. I still have 281 lines in dotfiles (according to `git ls-files | xargs cat | wc -l`), along with my dwm.tmux[0] as window manager, but I feel like I can generally operate in most environments as long as base tools are present. If others haven't tried it, I recommend giving it a go. Try being bravely default.

[0] https://github.com/saysjonathan/dwm.tmux

[froh]

ah, ed, "the unix standard text editor"

but why not awk then?

[saysjonathan]

Oh, I've used some awk too. My favorite (and most ridiculous) application was using the qawk from The AWK Programming Language[0] book to make a flat-file relational database of CSV files. Ultimately I just moved to sqlite but I learned a lot about awk in the process!

0: https://ia800708.us.archive.org/25/items/pdfy-MgN0H1joIoDVoI...

[jamesfinlayson]

Agreed. I had a workmate who stored all his dotfiles in git and checked them out on new computers.

With very few exceptions I just stick with the defaults and it works for me.

I also had other workmates who did everything in some exotic shell, so of course none of their one-liners worked in bash.

[jacobwiseberg]

I like this approach. I feel like my end result is somewhat similar nonetheless. I prefer to stick with as many defaults as I can and try and learn those first. I try to only change what I see really adds to my workflow.

[dietr1ch]

I landed on a modular home-manager config that I can setup once and update in a single command.

It keeps my machines uniform enough without too much hassle.