Kagamino's Blog

Editors

Nowadays, I use less and less IDEs and let agents do the coding part.

I’ve ditched VSCode and now only use Zed. It’s very snappy and featureful with extensions.

In the terminal, my default is Micro. It is easy to install, configurable with highlighting for many languages, and has intuitive default bindings.

I have a few very specific editors for some use cases, even if nowadays many extensions provide support for other use cases, and in a very usable editor

• Poedit is nice when working with translations, in Django for instance

Postgres

I play a lot with PostgreSQL these days, so I collected tools. My go-to CLI is pgcli: it is similar to psql in its interface, but has nice autocompletion and colors. I tried a few IDEs, but in the end I always end up writing queries in any IDE and running them via a CLI.

Writing

I use Obsidian as a knowledge base, and I’m quite happy with it. When working outside my vault, I use Zed again. There’s a markdown preview mode, and it renders mermaid diagrams.

AI Tools

At work, I have stopped using Claude Code CLI, and now only use Claude Desktop. As I read more and more text, the CLI doesn’t fit so much. I have it write markdown documents, and Claude Desktop renders them well (still doesn’t have mermaid support yet).

At home, I tried many tools like pi, opencode. Lately I have settled on oh-my-pi. It’s snappy and featureful (I only know like 10% of them). I started vibecoding a GNOME GTK cockpit that looks like Claude Desktop and can talk to omp sessions, for the same reasons I moved to Claude Desktop.

Unix TUI

I only use the Ghostty terminal. It has a native look and is quite performant, but I must say I don’t know all the features.

I find TUI/CLI are great for tasks you’d like to be very quick to do. I replaced some aged tools by more modern ones

• ripgrep over grep (the syntax is simpler to me)
• hyperfine for script benchmarks.
• ncdu helps to interactively find disk usage and clean whole directories.

Git

Sublime Merge has a great and snappy interface for staging changes. I find it much quicker to use than VSCode when many files are changed. I used to use TUI to get this performance, but I don’t need it anymore.

My alternative is to use difftastic to review large intricate changes: this tool provides semantic diffing that shows language-specific changes, all within the usual git CLI (git add -p).

I also started to use plannotator for code review. It provides AI-guided reviews that can help get through large changes. But I also use it to review the agent-generated code and leave comments for the agent to fix. It’s snappy and has good diffs.

There are also some git tips I sometimes need to find again:

• git diff --find-renames --diff-filter=M origin/master reduces file move noise when reviewing large refactors

I can also set up file-specific diffing within the CLI:

• sqldiff provides SQLite file diffs (add **/*.db diff=sqlite3 in .gitattributes)

Containers

I used Podman for some time, but I went back to Docker to remove some friction.

• lazydocker simplifies dynamic container management over repeated docker compose ps|stop …
• dive is a great tool to investigate why a container image is small or big.