The terminal tools I actually use with Claude
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the tools and plugins that became part of my Claude workflow: Superpowers, claude-mem, and rtk. This is a sort of companion to that one, about a different layer of the setup.
Something shifted once Claude started doing more of the typing. I still open the IDE all the time, but more and more it’s to review code, not to write it. And reviewing, reading diffs, checking CI, poking at what changed, turns out to be something I’m happy to do from the terminal. So that’s where a lot of my day has drifted.
The timing has been convenient, because terminal UIs are having a real moment again. The folks at charm.sh and a handful of others have made TUIs that are genuinely nice to use, not just nostalgic. Here are the ones that stuck.
Living in GitHub from the terminal
Two gh plugins do most of the work here.
gh-dash is a dashboard for pull requests. I can see what’s open, what’s waiting on me, and what’s waiting on someone else, all in one place.
gh-enhance is the other half. It shows me GitHub Actions runs, so I can watch how a CI pipeline is doing right from the terminal.
The payoff is the two together. I can go from a PR in gh-dash to its CI run in gh-enhance without ever reaching for the browser. That sounds like a small thing, but the browser is where I lose twenty minutes to a tab that turned into six.
Reading diffs and changes
This is where “review, not write” lands hardest.
delta is a pager for git diffs, and it’s a straight upgrade over the default. Syntax highlighting, sensible layout, line numbers that don’t get in the way. I set it once and stopped thinking about it.
diffnav is delta with a file tree bolted on. When Claude has touched fifteen files, a flat diff is hard to navigate. diffnav lets me move through the changes file by file, which is exactly what I want when the change is bigger than a single edit.
lazygit is the git client I reach for to understand the scope of what Claude did before I commit any of it. Staging hunk by hunk, reading the change as a whole, deciding what actually goes in. It’s the step where I stop being a spectator and make sure I know what I’m signing off on.
The rest of the kit
yazi is a terminal file explorer. Fast, keyboard-driven, good for moving around a project without leaving the shell.
glow renders markdown in the terminal, and it’s a better fit for my workflow than I expected. Superpowers produces brainstorm and design documents as markdown, and glow is how I read them. Turns out markdown is a lot more readable when something actually renders it for you.
Where it all runs
My terminal is still iTerm2. I gave Ghostty a try, but I didn’t find enough pull to move off something I already know inside out. Maybe I’ll give it another chance later.
For a while I was running agent-deck to manage my Claude sessions, it is a wrapper around TMUX and there’s a lot to like. It can fork a session easily, and it shares MCP servers across different installations. But the simplicity of a few iTerm2 tabs keeps pulling me back to it. I did make some changes that gives me a visual and audio alert whenever one of my open Claude sessions needs me, which is more useful than it sounds when you’ve got a couple of them working in parallel.
Conclusion
These tools are all part of this journey where I am learning how to better collaborate with AI coding tools. None of this is about the AI doing more of my thinking/reasoning. It’s quite the opposite. As Claude takes on more of the “code writing”, these tools keep me close to the work, reviewing the diff, checking the pipeline, understanding the change before it lands. The terminal turned out to be a good place to do that, and it has been kinda cool. Sometimes it makes me feel like one of these hackers in The Matrix.