Timeless Terminal Based "IDE"
This post is a bit of an homage to some of the development tools I have used for almost two decades now. Despite their age and their simplicity, these tools are timeless and have been easy to adapt to the AI and Agentic Development era, proving that you don’t always need a complex IDE (Integrated Development Environment) to be productive.
vim
My go-to code and text editor has been Vim for some time now. It was the open-source Janus distribution from Yehuda Katz and Carl Lerche that first drew me into Vim, and quite frankly, I don’t know Vim without Janus.
While the repository has become a bit stale over the years, I’ve recently forked it and made some additions, like vim-ai, to its collection of tools.
My .vimrc.after
file and my
vim-ai roles file
are both available on my dotfiles repo.
tmux
Next on the list is tmux, which is really the workhorse of my terminal development experience. Within a single terminal tab, I can have multiple processes and shells running at once. My usual setup anchors vim at the #1 window spot, with windows for testing tools, development services, and more, or an additional bash shell for running commands and interacting with git.
More recently, either OpenCode or Claude Code will take up another window spot and tmux overall is well suited for handling CLI-based agentic tooling.
To make managing sessions easier, I use tmuxinator, which is a Ruby gem for managing tmux sessions with a YAML file.
My .tmux.conf file
is also available in my dotfiles repo.
ssh
Last on the list is Secure Shell, which is key for allowing me to develop from anywhere. I strongly prefer to develop on Linux over using macOS, so for most projects I will SSH into a Ubuntu development server I run at home. This server has plenty of CPU and memory and lets me run Docker services and databases with ease.
When not on my local network, in the past I’ve relied on Dynamic DNS and router port forwarding. More recently, I’ve started to use Tailscale for private networking. I cannot recommend Tailscale enough, it’s a great product!
My Terminal IDE
These 3 tools are the cornerstrong of my terminal IDE. All of these tools are also well suited for running AI and Agentic tools.