Tools
The Dev Tools I Actually Use Every Single Day
Not a list of 47 VS Code extensions. Just the handful of tools that have survived three years on my machine.
Edwine Nyakundi
Full stack engineer · Jun 30, 2026 · 6 min read
Tooling posts age badly because most of them list things the author tried once. These are the ones I'd notice missing within an hour.
The terminal four
- ripgrep — search across a monorepo faster than my editor can index it.
- fzf — fuzzy-find files, branches, shell history, everything.
- lazygit — staging hunks interactively without leaving the keyboard.
- httpie — curl for humans, especially when debugging JSON APIs.
class=class="tok-string">"tok-comment"># find every TODO left in the app source, with context
rg -n class=class="tok-string">"tok-comment">--glob class="tok-string">'!node_modules' -C2 class="tok-string">'TODO|FIXME' src/
class=class="tok-string">"tok-comment"># check out a branch interactively
git branch class=class="tok-string">"tok-comment">--all | fzf | xargs git checkoutIn the editor
Two extensions, both boring: a formatter on save and an error lens. Everything else was noise I eventually uninstalled.
The real productivity gain was never the tools. It was deleting the ones I'd stopped using.
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