Revenge of the Terminal

Its Time Has Come!

Mike Riley
The Pragmatic Programmers
2 min readFeb 2, 2023

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One of the joys of programming is the ability to scratch my own itches. Itches like tasks and apps that suck my time and system resources. Since switching over to Linux (and occasionally returning to Windows for work-related projects), I have converted many of my day-to-day inquires and utilities to CLI-based applications. I created personalized Twitter, Reddit, and chat apps — using Go or Rust — with specific key-bound commands. For example, I can mark all Reddit posts as read and hidden with one tap. These shortcuts have considerably accelerated my information flows.

While streamlining these external services for my unique use cases, I also significantly reduce the consumption of system resources on my computers. Rather than spending a lot of CPU and RAM on drawing windows and widgets that I don’t need, I am able to zip through all my updates and barely nudge either of these system metrics. This optimization keeps my rigs running cool and provides ample room for processing when I really need the resources.

Now that I have these custom, lightweight terminal apps at my disposal, I have some further tweaks lined up. I plan to leverage AI tools like ChatGPT combined with custom AI sets to process specific queries on the information I’m collecting to filter out topics of little interest and highlight high-priority data. Yes, those processes require system resources, but having a couple of terminal sessions open to run them will still consume far fewer resources than displaying a blank Word document — that’s for sure!

📢 What are your time and resource-saving strategies for 2023? Share in the comments.

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