The terminal setup I keep coming back to.

Every couple of years I fall into the dotfiles hole. New prompt, new plugin manager, a theme with exactly the right shade of blue. A month later I am back to something very close to what I started with.

What survives is boring. zsh with almost no plugins, a prompt that shows the directory and the git branch and nothing else, and about twenty aliases that I actually type. If I have not used an alias in a month, it gets deleted.

The single most useful thing in my setup is a fuzzy finder bound to Ctrl-R for history. I search my own past far more than I search the internet. A close second is a tiny script that opens the current repo in the browser at the right branch.

I keep project commands in each project, not in my shell. A package.json script or a Makefile target means the next person, including future me on a fresh laptop, gets the same commands without copying my config.

The real lesson took me a while: the best tool setup is the one you can rebuild from memory in fifteen minutes. Everything beyond that is a hobby, which is fine, as long as I am honest that it is one.