---
title: Tools I use in 2026
date: 2026-04-20
tags:
  - tooling
  - personal
description: A short, opinionated list of the editor, terminal, and dev-loop
  tools that survived another year on my machine.
url: https://kevinkiklee.io/posts/tools-i-use-in-2026
---

> Placeholder post — written to exercise rendering paths during development.
> Will be replaced before launch.

A short list of tools that earned their keep on my machine in 2026. No affiliate links, no rankings — just what's actually open right now.

## Editor

- **Zed** for day-to-day TypeScript and Astro work. The collaborative cursor is genuinely useful for pairing.
- **VS Code** when I need a specific extension that hasn't shipped to Zed yet.

## Terminal

- **Ghostty** as the terminal emulator.
- **fish** as the shell. I switched from zsh in 2025 and haven't looked back.
- **eza**, **bat**, **fd**, **rg** as the standard `ls`/`cat`/`find`/`grep` replacements.

## JS / TS

- **pnpm** for everything. npm and yarn don't get installed on new machines anymore.
- **Biome** instead of ESLint + Prettier. One tool, faster, fewer config files to babysit.
- **Vitest** for unit tests. **Playwright** for end-to-end.

## What I dropped

- Webpack — Turbopack and Vite cover all my use cases now.
- nvm — switched to **fnm**, which is dramatically faster.

That's the list. Short on purpose; the moment a list of tools gets long, it stops being useful and becomes a bibliography.