My terminal is where I spend most of my working day, yet for years my setup was one long .zshrc , a full framework I only used a fraction of, and a home folder full of hidden files I couldn't explain. In the last few weeks, I sat down and rebuilt it from the ground up around three small tools: Ghostty, starship, and antidote.

So, below, you will find a short walkthrough of that setup, along with a few suggestions for keeping your home folder clean without breaking anything. All config files are in my development-utilities repository. In my experience, reading through a few small config files is still the best way to understand how a shell really starts up.

How Ghostty, zsh, antidote, and starship fit together

As a small side note, and since these names often get mixed up, here's how the pieces relate.

If we think of the setup as a car, zsh is the engine. antidote is the parts manager that bolts plugins onto the engine (completion, syntax highlighting, git aliases).…