Tools Worth Changing To in 2025

It’s almost 2025 in my part of the world and that means another year has gone by. Another year of love. Another year of joy. 2024 was a great year for me and my family overall. There were highs- we opened a physical location for my wife’s chocolate business, Lily & Sparrow, and I joined the team at Oxide Computer Company. There were lows- one of our dogs passed away and we adopted another shortly after.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life it’s that the highs and lows come whether you’re prepared for them or not. I also learned that the highs and lows both manifest in the same way- through change. This post isn’t meant to be a philosophy of change but I did want to mention one thing. People often think about change from the perspective of things outside of their control (e.g., our dog passing away). I want to challenge you to think about change from the perspective of things that you can control (e.g., your behavior).

You can change yourself. You can change what you do, what you say, and even how you think. It’s healthy to reevaluate yourself every now and again and think about what you can and should change. I do this myself both personally and professionally. In this post I want to share with you the professional changes I’ve made, or will be making, to my tools and encourage you to reflect and change your own tools in the new year.

Let’s see which tools are worth checking out in 2025.

Ghostty #

Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration. It’s written in Zig and created by Mitchell Hashimoto who co-founded HashiCorp, a previous employer of mine. Ghostty was publicly released in December 2024 but I’ve been using Ghostty as my terminal emulator well before that during its beta period. Ghostty has since become my primary terminal emulator, replacing GNOME Terminal and Alacritty.

Terminal emulators are meant to be functional, stable, and out of the way by design so you might be wondering why I even listed Ghostty. After all, there are dozens of terminal emulators out there that work perfectly well. What makes Ghostty special? Honestly, nothing. Ghostty isn’t special. It’s not trying to reinvent terminal emulators with some flashy new feature or gimmick. Instead, in my opinion, Ghostty aims to reimplement terminal emulators with the goals of being native, feature-rich, and fast.

Here’s why I like Ghostty and believe you should give it a try.

• It’s cross-platform and native. Ghostty works across macOS and Linux with Windows support being discussed in ghostty-org/ghostty#2563. I have the same experience across all my machines without Ghostty feeling like a macOS app on Linux or vice versa. Ghostty feels like it belongs on the machine.
• The configuration is optional, yet extensive. Ghostty follows a zero configuration philosophy which means it’s designed to work out of the box with no configuration necessary for most users. However, when configuration is needed there are a multitude of configuration options ready to be used in a simple key-value format. No TOML, YAML, JSON, HCL (Sorry Mitchell!), or other DSL to learn.
• It’s fast. Like “oops I just accidentally ran cat /bin/sh and my terminal didn’t hang” fast. As someone who uses a terminal text editor and spends most of their working day in a terminal emulator, having a fast terminal emulator is a necessity.
• The potential of libghostty. The Ghostty architecture is a core library named libghostty with native GUI applications (e.g., SwiftUI on macOS, GTK on Linux) that consume it. That means other applications can use libghostty to provide a terminal emulator to their users without having to implement all the difficult stuff! Imagine Zed or VS Code using Ghostty as their embedded terminal emulator.
• The maintainer is friendly with a clear vision. Mitchell is the self-proclaimed benevolent dictator for life for now (BDFLFN) and has set a clear vision for Ghostty. Contributions and discussions are welcome and the Ghostty Discord community is active. It’s refreshing to see a healthy community with someone at the helm who welcomes community feeback, especially after reading how another maintainer responded in alacritty/alacritty#3926.

Fish #

Fish is a smart and user-friendly command line shell for Linux, macOS, and the rest of the family. I started using fish full-time in 2024 after a decade of using bash with a sprinkle of zsh mixed in. Bash was perfectly fine for my use case- it was a POSIX shell that I had configured perfectly to my minimalist taste. Zsh, on the other hand, took forever to start with the Oh My Zsh framework that left a bad taste in my mouth. Sorry zsh, I know it wasn’t your fault.

If bash was fine and zsh wasn’t it then why did I switch to fish? The answers are simple, if not a bit subjective.

• Fish has fantastic autosuggestions that are based on your command history, configured completions, and file paths. This all works out of the box with zero configuration necessary. Yes I know things like Atuin exist but that’s only for shell history and I’m not someone that needs my history across multiple machines. In fact, I history clear every so often anyway! Yes, go ahead, look at me like I’m a monster.
• Fish supports the XDG Base Directory Specification. I can declutter my home directory and make my configuration more modular and easy to reason about. Admittedly I’m still in progress on this but it’s better than a large ~/.bashrc file or some sourcing logic with ..
• Fish has nice builtins and the syntax feels like a programming language. I’m no stranger to the bash syntax but it does get pretty frustrating having to look up the syntax for string substitution or pipe things to sed. Fish has a nice string builtin for that. Fish feels more like Python and Ruby than bash.
• Fish is actively maintained. Okay, I know pretty much every shell is actively maintained but fish is in the middle of a rewrite from C++ to Rust. I’m not one to choose programs solely based on the language they are written in but I do work at a company that largely uses Rust and any maintainer willing to do a rewrite of their program has my respect. Not because it’s difficult but because it shows a level of care and detail for all parts of the code, even the parts that haven’t been touched in a while.

Helix #

Helix is a “post-modern” text editor with inspirations from Kakoune and Neovim. If you’re coming from Neovim, like I was, think of Helix as Neovim without needing plugins for common configuration. Helix is all about selections and it flips Neovim’s motion-verb-noun design into motion-noun-verb. For example, deleting 2 words in Neovim is 2dw while in Helix it’s v2wd.

I switched to Helix a few weeks before writing this post so I’m still familiarizing myself with it. I’ll give myself another month or so before decidiing if I’ll stay or switch back to Neovim. Here’s what I’m liking so far.

• Common configuration is built in. Helix doesn’t require plugins for LSP configuration, tree-sitter, or fuzzy finding. All of that is built into Helix and can be overriden on a per-user or per-project basis. I’m primarily working in Go and Rust these days and those languages work extremely well out of the box. I do miss mason.nvim to manage my language server and linter installations, but I can live without it.
• Helix is fast. Coming from Neovim I already had a fast editor but when I opened Helix to do its :tutor I was impressed with how responsive it was. That’s not surprising to me given that Helix is written in Rust but it’s nice to see it in action. I surely don’t miss the days when VS Code would take seconds to open and crash when viewing large files. How do people live like that?
• Helix has useful features and a context menu when keys are pressed. I can use C to add multiple cursors and then insert text or select text and modify it. I don’t use multiple cursors often but it’s pretty convenient in places where I’d normally have to resort to a Neovim macro. I do use Helix’s surround integration often though. I press mi" to select text within double quotes and ms{ to surround the selected text with braces. If you don’t know what to do, simply press a key and Helix will show a menu of possible options similar to which-key.nvim.

Jujutsu #

Jujutsu is a version control system that can be used with, or in place of, Git. Jujutsu is unique in that it separates the user experience of version control from the underlying storage system storing the bytes. This allows Jujutsu to work with Git repositories by using Git as a storage backend, making it seamless to experiment with.

Jujutsu is… different. It doesn’t have a concept of named branches but instead operates like a detached HEAD with commits, undo functionality, and automatic rebase and conflict resolution. Covering the features of Jujutsu warrants its own blog post so if you’re looking to try it out I recommend reading Steve Klabnik’s Jujutsu Tutorial. I’ve replaced git with jj entirely in my personal and professional use. Here’s why I really like it.

• Freedom from named branches. I can just work on revisions as necessary before coming up with a name for what I’m doing. I can edit previous revisions directly, rebase them, or squash them. Then when I’m ready to create a pull request on GitHub I can name my revision with a bookmark and I’m all set.
• It’s simple to use. It takes a second to get used to Jujutsu’s syntax but once you do it’s simple to use. You can just jj new and jj commit your way around and jj undo if you do something you didn’t mean to.
• Git compatibility. It’s tough creating a new tool when an incumbent tool exists. It’s even tougher to make that tool compatible with the incumbent tool while introducing new features. Jujutsu does a great job at both.

Zed #

Zed is a next-generation code editor designed for high-performance collaboration with humans and AI. Zed is written in Rust and was created by a developer from Atom, an editor I used to use before Microsoft axed it in favor of VS Code sunset it.

I have Zed installed and have tried it for some development work but ultimately I’m a terminal editor person at heart so I don’t use Zed as a daily driver. I am, however, excited for the future of Zed and that’s why it’s on this list. Perhaps it can replace your editor. Here are some reasons you’d might want to switch.

• Zed is fast. Zed focuses a lot on performance and is one of the fastest graphical editors out there. If you’re over the slowness of VS Code then Zed might be for you.
• Zed has first-party support for collaboration and AI. There are text and voice chats- bye bye VS Code Live Share- and support for AI prompts and code editing. I used Zed with Ollama, Anthropic, and OpenAI and it was a pleasant experience.
• Zed has many extensions. The Zed developers and community created a ton of extensions for all popular use cases. If extensions are what you like about your editor then Zed’s got you covered.

Nix #

Nix is a tool that provides declarative builds, deployments, and system configuration for Unix-like systems. Nix has a high learning curve but I’m told once you get over that learning curve you’ll be rewarded with the ultimate Linux experience. Nix is highly regarded by those who use it and an operating system, NixOS, was created using Nix as its core method for system configuration.

I can’t list what I like about Nix since I haven’t yet taken the time to learn it but it’s something I look forward to learning in 2025.

Ollama #

Ollama is a program to run large language models (LLMs) locally on your machine. I use Ollama to run models such as llama3.2:3b, mistral:7b, and codellama:7b. In fact, Ollama is the primary way that I interact with LLMs nowadays after I got tired of deciding whether to pay for Anthropic or OpenAI each month. There’s really not much to say here other than AI is a useful tool to add to one’s toolbelt. I like Ollama for the following reasons.

• It’s local. I don’t need internet connectivity to use Ollama which makes it great when working on trains, planes, or any other place where your network connection is unreliable.
• It’s fast, with a GPU. I run Ollama with a GTX 1080Ti on my desktop and an RX 7700S on my Framework 16 and the speed is great! When I remove the GPU on my laptop, which is something I can do with the Framework 16, the speed of Ollama takes a hit but it’s still acceptable for most use cases.
• It’s riding the AI wave. AI isn’t going away anytime soon and Ollama stays up to date with popular models and other community trained models. I believe you can train your own model with Ollama but I haven’t had time to test that. Perhaps I will soon but for now I enjoy the model updates.

Final Thoughts #

I hope this post inspired you to change things about your life. Start with your tools and then move to yourself. Happy New Year everyone!