ContractorKeith ask any tradesman about his toolbelt and you’ll get a twenty-minute answer. mine took years to dial in. tape on the right hip, pencil behind the ear, the things you grab a hundred times a day sitting exactly where your hand already knows to find them.
a stock macos terminal is a toolbelt straight off the shelf at the big box store. it technically works. but ls gives you a wall of gray text, cat dumps code with no highlighting, cd makes you type full paths like it’s 1995, and man answers a simple question with 47 pages.
so i built homebrew-cli-toolbelt: one install script that upgrades the whole belt.
what’s in it
58 tools in the full tier, though you don’t have to start there. the script asks which tier you want:
- minimal: 12 tools, installs in about 2 minutes. the daily drivers.
- intermediate: 26 tools. adds git tooling, a file manager, searchable shell history.
- full: all 58. the whole truck.
the replacements are the point. bat instead of cat, with syntax highlighting and git markers. eza instead of ls, with icons and a tree view. ripgrep instead of grep, which on a big repo is the difference between instant and go-get-coffee. zoxide instead of cd: type z proj and you land in the folder you use most. lazygit instead of memorizing git incantations, and i’d argue it teaches you git faster than any tutorial does. tldr instead of man pages, because i wanted the 5 practical examples, not the 47 pages.
every tool ships with its own cheatsheet, 30 of them in the repo. print one, tape it next to the monitor, learn one tool a week. it’s the same way you bring along an apprentice.
why bother, if the AI types the commands now
fair question. claude code will happily run grep for you all day.
but the toolbelt isn’t competing with claude code. it’s the foundation under it. i spend my day watching what the AI does in my terminal, and the stock tools make that harder than it needs to be. delta turns diffs into something you can actually read. lazygit lets me review every change before it gets committed. btop tells me what’s eating the laptop when a build goes sideways. the AI does the typing, but i still have to see the work and judge it.
you wouldn’t hand a new hire your estimating spreadsheet before teaching them to read a plan.
the bug that shipped 27 minutes after launch
i pushed the mvp at 7:04 on a march evening. by 7:31 there was a bugfix commit.
the install script writes aliases into your .zshrc, and my colored status messages were getting caught in the same output redirect, so the script was writing literal ansi color codes into people’s shell configs. garbage like \033[0;32m sitting in a config file forever. the fix was one redirect: send status messages to stderr so they hit the terminal instead of the file.
the script already backed up your .zshrc before touching it, because 37 years of measure-twice leaves a mark. but still. ship something and you find out within the hour what you missed. that part of software feels exactly like walking a punch list.
try it
clone the repo and run ./install.sh. it checks for homebrew, asks which tier you want, backs up your shell config, and gets out of the way. if you just installed claude code or codex and the terminal still feels like a rental, this is the upgrade.
start with minimal. your hands will learn where everything lives.