CLI

I run VMs constantly. Testing Kubernetes deployments, trying out a distro I read about, running Windows for that one stubborn application, isolating an experiment so I don’t wreck my actual machine. KVM/QEMU is the right tool for all of it. Near-native performance, completely open source, baked straight into the Linux kernel. Nothing to phone home, nothing to license, no vendor deciding what I’m allowed to do with my own hardware. ...

The first time it bit me I was halfway through a database migration over SSH. Train hit a tunnel, WiFi blinked, connection gone. The process running on the other end went with it. I sat there staring at a dead prompt wondering how much of the migration had actually committed. A terminal multiplexer would have saved me. The process keeps running on the server whether I’m attached or not, so a dropped connection becomes a non-event. I reconnect, reattach, and the work is exactly where I left it. That property alone is worth the setup cost, and it’s why I treat a multiplexer as part of the base layer on every machine I touch. ...

Here is how a lot of us work in 2026: a dotfiles repo with years of commits, a vim config that pulls in thirty plugins, a tmux prefix remapped to something more comfortable, a shell prompt that took a weekend to get right. The setup is yours, down to the last keybinding. On your laptop, you are fast. Muscle memory does the work and you barely think about the tools at all. That is the dream we sell ourselves, and most of the time it holds up fine. ...

My .zshrc is older than some of my coworkers’ careers. Same with my .vimrc and my tmux config. They’ve grown into a carefully tuned system that does exactly what I want, and I’d be lost without them. The problem is that I run multiple machines. A laptop, a desktop, sometimes a throwaway VM for testing. Keeping all of that in sync used to be a pile of improvised hacks held together by hope. ...

Here is the payoff before the work: I plug in my YubiKey in the morning, type one PIN, and the rest of the day my authentication just happens. SSH to a server, no password. Sign a git commit, no passphrase. Pull a secret out of pass, just touch the key. One physical thing sits in a USB port and the friction is gone. Getting there cost me about three evenings of swearing at gpg-agent. Now that it runs, going back feels unthinkable. ...