50 - Shivam Nagar
Shivam Nagar is a Computer Science student from Ghaziabad, India.
His journey with customization started back in school when he was using Windows. He spent hours browsing the r/unixporn subreddit and was fascinated by the amazing setups people shared. Seeing everyone’s unique workflows made him want to build one of his own, so he eventually switched to Linux and started experimenting with desktop customization. He never reached the level of many experienced users, but he learned a lot and enjoyed the process.
When he started college, he moved to a Mac. That’s when he discovered the macOS customization community through YouTube. Linkarzu was the creator who inspired him the most, and many ideas from his videos became the foundation of his setup.
It took him around two weeks to put everything together. He customized almost every part of his development environment, from his terminal and shell to Neovim and the command-line tools he uses every day. The only thing he never felt the need to change was the macOS menu bar. He actually prefers Apple’s default menu bar because he finds it clean, simple, and easy to use.
Neovim & Terminal
Shivam started using Neovim because he wanted to learn it after seeing so many developers use it. Since he was a complete beginner, he learned mostly through YouTube. Creators like Linkarzu, ThePrimeagen, and TypeCraft helped him understand the basics, and he gradually picked up the tools and plugins they used. He did not go too deep into customization, but over time he built a setup that fits his workflow.
For his terminal, he tried Alacritty, Kitty, and WezTerm before settling on Ghostty. It felt like the perfect balance of speed and simplicity. Everything from the font rendering to image support works great in it.
Favorite Tools
Neovim — Used for coding, writing, and note-taking in a keyboard-driven environment.
Ghostty — A lightweight terminal emulator that keeps the setup fast and simple.
fzf — A fuzzy finder used to quickly search files, commands, and history.
tmux — A terminal multiplexer for managing multiple terminal sessions and panes.
Lazygit — A terminal UI for Git that makes commits, branches, and diffs easier to manage.
Starship — A minimal shell prompt that shows useful context without adding clutter.
eza — A modern replacement for
lswith cleaner output and better file listing features.Gum — A tool for building interactive shell scripts and improving command-line aliases.
yt-dlp — A command-line tool for downloading videos and media from supported sites.
Dotfiles
Shivam’s dotfiles contain the configuration for his macOS development environment, including Ghostty, Zsh, Neovim, tmux, and the command-line tools he uses.
You can find it here https://github.com/io-PEAK/dotfiles
That looks really cool. Iain Simmons shared this with me ❤️