Terminal with modern CLI tools

New tools I'm testing

Every few months I carve out time to evaluate tools I’ve bookmarked but never actually used. Most don’t survive the first hour. They solve problems I don’t have, or they solve real problems in ways that create new ones. But occasionally something sticks, and when it does, it tends to reshape how I work in ways I didn’t anticipate. The current batch of CLI tools feels different from what I was evaluating a few years ago. Back then, the trend was rewriting Unix classics in Rust for speed gains that rarely mattered in practice. Now the interesting work is happening at the interface level — tools that understand context, that present information in ways optimized for how humans actually read terminal output, that integrate with the broader ecosystem rather than standing alone. ...

Digital tools of the modern butler

The essence of service has not changed in centuries. What has changed are the instruments at our disposal. A butler in 1890 carried a pocket watch and a leather-bound ledger; his counterpart today wields a smartphone and a suite of invisible applications. The purpose remains identical: to anticipate needs, coordinate complexity, and ensure that everything runs smoothly without the principals ever noticing the machinery behind the curtain. ...