Nothing makes a terminal feel more like home as one’s own shell configuration. My shell is bash, configured through a .bashrc and .profile. Bash is likely to be present in any Unix machine one uses.

Bash is also my primary IDE. This allows for keeping a relatively simple set of utilities and tools to internalize. Coupled with a reliable window manager, workflows can be quickly scripted in the head. Shell scripts are an option as well for more complex flows. This can be done at multiple levels: using uniquely identifiable comments in commands , bash functions, complete bash script.

Apart from the standard utilities (sed, cut, cat, tr etc.), I use a few tools as an aid:

• ag for amazingly fast lookup in files.
• rsync, to keep the files synchronized with remote servers.
• entr to run build/test commands on a file change. Or, with rsync, synchronize on modifications.
• autojump to jump directly to frequently used directories.
• jq to process JSON output of a command.

Tools are designed for the console first, and then bound to editors or IDEs. Familiarizing oneself to the command line interface makes the maximum amount of functionality accessible. For example, magit is a powerful git interface for Emacs, but can be limiting for complex git operations such as an interactive rebase.

Composibility of the various commands can be useful as well, allowing one to build complex, repeatable commands. For example, the following uses ip to change a system’s default route, given the interface:

ip route del default &> /dev/null
ip route replace default via $(ip route
     | grep ppp0 # Change this filter as per need.
     | sed -r 's/\.0\/[[:digit:]]{2,3} /.1 /'
     | cut -d ' ' -f -4)

A great piece of literature on the Unix Philosophy is The Art of Unix Programming by Eric S. Raymond. It also talks about the Unix interface design.