Category: Tools & Setup

Tools & Setup is where orthogonal.info curates practical, battle-tested guides on developer productivity tools, CLI utilities, self-hosted software, and environment configuration. Whether you are bootstrapping a new development machine, evaluating self-hosted alternatives to SaaS products, or fine-tuning your terminal workflow, this category delivers step-by-step walkthroughs grounded in real-world experience. Every article is written with one goal: help you build a faster, more reliable, and more enjoyable development environment.

With over 25 in-depth posts and growing, Tools & Setup is one of the most active categories on the site — reflecting just how much time engineers spend (and save) by getting their tooling right from day one.

Key Topics Covered

Command-line productivity — Shell customization (Zsh, Fish, Starship), terminal multiplexers (tmux, Zellij), and CLI utilities like ripgrep, fd, fzf, and bat that supercharge daily workflows.
Self-hosted alternatives — Deploying and configuring tools like Gitea, Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, and Uptime Kuma so you own your data without sacrificing usability.
IDE and editor setup — Configuration guides for VS Code, Neovim, and JetBrains IDEs, including extension recommendations, keybindings, and remote development workflows.
Development environment automation — Using Ansible, Homebrew, Nix, dotfiles repositories, and container-based dev environments (Dev Containers, Devbox) to make setups reproducible.
Git workflows and tooling — Advanced Git techniques, hooks, aliases, and GUI clients that streamline version control for solo developers and teams alike.
API testing and debugging — Hands-on guides for curl, HTTPie, Postman, and browser DevTools to debug REST and GraphQL APIs efficiently.
Package and runtime management — Managing multiple language runtimes with asdf, mise, nvm, and pyenv, plus dependency management best practices.

Who This Content Is For
This category is designed for software engineers, DevOps practitioners, system administrators, and hobbyist developers who want to work smarter, not harder. Whether you are a junior developer setting up your first Linux workstation or a senior engineer optimizing a multi-machine workflow, you will find actionable advice that respects your time. The guides assume basic command-line comfort but explain advanced concepts clearly.

What You Will Learn
By exploring the articles in Tools & Setup, you will learn how to automate repetitive environment tasks so a fresh machine is productive in minutes, not days. You will discover modern CLI replacements for legacy Unix tools, understand how to evaluate self-hosted software against its SaaS equivalent, and gain confidence configuring complex development stacks. Each guide includes copy-paste commands, configuration snippets, and links to upstream documentation so you can adapt the advice to your own infrastructure.

Start browsing below to find your next productivity upgrade.