Jeff Atwood once famously proclaimed “we are typists first, programmers second”. While I think software development is a little more complicated than that, this quote brings up an important point: efficiency in software development hinges on the tooling we choose. For the longest time I used Bash as my UNIX shell. It got the job done. I would occasionally feel frustrated by a repetitive command or a missing feature, but there was usually an alias or script I could apply like a bandaid to minimize the pain enough to keep going. I even switched to iTerm several years back to improve my terminal emulator GUI. I worked with Bash for long enough that I managed to amass a pretty fancy .bash_profile config. If you’re curious about my config, you can check it out for yourself.