It has taken almost 30 years of programming, but I've finally become the kind of programmer who spends half of a lazy Sunday morning making sure all of the terminals on my various "linux*" computers scattered around my house are standardized.
I blame the fact that I first cut my teeth professionally as a Microsoft/Windows developer, and there was a long time when Windows was almost proud of how much boring command line stuff they tucked neatly behind wizards and dialog windows. The claim at the time was that they were making it easier for Windows developers to develop on Windows. In hindsight I realize that it was a rather insidious method of hiding the rest of the open source eco-system away any developers who they managed to capture inside of their walled garden.
At the same time, I have Microsoft to thank for re-awakening my love of the terminal and all things command line when they launched the new Windows Terminal along with WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) and eventually WSL2, effectively giving Windows developers the best of all worlds by baking full blown Linux into the operating system. All of a sudden I was free to engage with an ecosystem that had completely abandoned Microsoft and it was like emerging from Plato's cave. Stepping into the light I realized that the whole Microsoft ecosystem that I spent most of my career inside of was just one tiny part of a much larger whole.
I don't think Microsoft would have embraced Linux and open source so strongly if Apple hadn't stolen their playbook and created an even more attractive walled garden, which forced Microsoft in turn to adapt or die.
Good for them, they pulled it off, good for me, it caused a renaissance in my career, and here we are. I find myself inside of Linux shells more often than not these days. I did the typical evolution from Bash to Zsh, and more recently I've found myself curious about the various text editors and debuggers available.
For years I'd heard developers (usually one person per team) talking about how they use Vi to write code and as a only casual Linux user I'd always assumed they were basically coding in Notepad and putting themselves through pain for no reason. But I've been hearing more and more about NeoVim lately so I decided to look into it. Turns out I was completely wrong about text editors in Linux, and I can 100% understand why they have such a strong following. A lot of my favorite VSCode/Visual Studio features have existed in Vim/NeoVim for many, many years (split screen, tabs, multi-line editing, debugging) and the fact that they've done it all inside of your shell is amazing and makes me wonder what else I've been missing.