Terminal Customization in 2026

Working in the terminal

I never thought I would be that guy, but here we are - I now have an embarrasing desire to use my computer as much as I can from the terminal. I don’t really know exactly where it came from or why, all I can say is that it satisfies a desire in me to have control over my experience. Since learning Neovim and adopting it as my primary editor, I had a realization that all of the applications that I’ve been using - Chrome, Spotify, VSCode - they’re all fancy wrappers for rudimentary tasks.
Neovim showed me that something simpler, something totally free and transparent that I can make myself, could be just as good (if not better) than those apps. This kind of software feels like a gateway to learning how things really work - you can look at the code yourself to understand what’s happening.

Practical example that happened to me today

Take, for instance, a file manager. Today after work, I installed a TUI file manager I’d had my eye on in Terminal Trove - it’s called rovr. I have started becoming frustrated with Windows’ out of the box file manager. Searching for files is slow and the program itself is so basic yet, seems to consume so much memory.

All of those issues are addressed with this file manager, with the added bonus that it uses vim keybindings just like I use in Neovim.

Now I can navigate my folder heirarchy much more quickly, and there are even plugin options for enhanced functionality, like using ripgrep for extremely fast fuzzy searching.

Exploring a new world of software

This was just one small example. Terminal Trove is full of interesting tools and even entire shells to explore.

What excites me the most about all of these is that they’re all open source. I looked through the repository for rovr, and it’s a readable and well organized python project. The learning potential here is massive, if I really like a tool I have the opportunity to learn how it works, maybe even try to contribute to it…

I want to catalog this journey through the weird world of software. Going forward, I want to write about these tools, what I’m learning, what I’m working on, and any random interesting things I happen to learn in daily life.