Never Leaving Mi Terminal

A dark terminal setup with code

Photo by Chris Ried on Unsplash

Let's go back a little – I got my first laptop at age 18. Before that, I had a PC running Windows. One of my school classmates introduced me to Linux distros, especially the ones you know for "hacking" (Kali, BlackTrack, BlackArch – you name it). My favorite activity used to be downloading ISOs and keep dual-booting my system with random distros. I didn't know even 0.01% of pen-testing or anything like that. It just felt really cool to me at the time. I even got my first and only Alfa adapter – you know what I would have used it for ;)

When my PC became too slow and dumb, I got my first laptop – a Mac. I instantly downloaded a virtual machine and started doing the same noob stuff. Eventually, I got bored and stopped. Then I started learning PHP because, of course, Zuck used it to make Facebook. I did a lot of in-and-out stupid stuff, but one thing remained constant: the terminal.

I never used Terminal as a editor initially. It was just through using Linux distros that I got introduced to it. My hands got comfortable on the keyboard, and I felt like this cool person working in the terminal. This went on for a while until one day, I got introduced to Vim via a coding tutorial. I was intrigued by what the person was using in the video. After browsing a bit, I found out about Vim. Back then, there were no fancy configs or anything – just a few themes and some fuzzy finding.

Initially, it felt like a pain just to get used to the bindings and configs and all. But when I did master it, it felt like magic – and this feeling, till today, is so damn difficult to explain to people who don't use Vim. Fast forward, I migrated to Neovim, then LazyVim, and so on.

I was so intrigued with the terminal that I started searching for every single tool available for it:

Music player? CMUS
PDF viewer? Zathura
Code editor? Neovim
File manager? Vifm And so many more...

The terminal became my comfort place on my laptop. If you ask if I ever used VSCode – yes, I did initially in college. But through Vim, I discovered the concept of customization, and now I do it everywhere: my terminal, my apps, you name it. I think it's just when you get to customize each aspect of something and you're able to do it yourself, it impacts all different areas. Now I want everything to be customized according to my needs.

If it ain't customizable I ain't using.

People like ThePrimeagen, devaslife, tjdevries are just folks who keep me motivated to code and enjoy coding when I'm not feeling it. These people are just awesome.

Terminal 😌

Gracias.