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Published on 17.02.2026
TLDR: Rust-based CLI tools, GPU-accelerated terminal emulators, AI coding agents, and a matured Neovim ecosystem have converged to create a genuine terminal renaissance. The terminal never left — it just got dramatically better while we weren't looking.
The story starts back in 2016, when Andrew Gallant created ripgrep as a Rust benchmark and accidentally demonstrated that modern systems languages could deliver ten to one hundred times better performance than traditional Unix utilities. What followed was a wave of modern CLI replacements: bat replaced cat, fd replaced find, eza replaced ls, zoxide replaced cd. "Rewrite it in Rust" became a Hacker News joke, but these tools proved the point — they were genuinely faster, more intuitive, and prettier out of the box.
But it wasn't just the tools inside terminals that evolved. The terminals themselves got a dramatic upgrade. Kitty, Alacritty, WezTerm, Warp, and Ghostty — written in Python, Rust, and Zig — brought GPU-accelerated rendering, ligature support, splits, and modern themes to what used to be a black-and-white rectangle. The old terminal aesthetic is dead.
Here's the part that ties it all together: AI coding agents need terminals. Claude Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, Gemini CLI — these tools operate natively in terminal environments because that's where they can work consistently across every environment: SSH sessions, Docker containers, cloud VMs. Tools like Cursor and Windsurf are powerful but tethered to VSCode-style ecosystems. Terminal-based AI follows you everywhere. This created a powerful incentive: if you want AI to use your tool, build a CLI. And vendors took notice — Playwright added a proper CLI for browser automation, GitHub CLI kept improving, and developers started building CLI-first tools specifically designed for AI integration.
Then there's Neovim. According to the Stack Overflow 2024 developer survey, Neovim is the most admired code editor. With native LSP support, Treesitter integration, Lua configuration, and distributions like LazyVim and Kickstart.nvim, the traditional learning curve has essentially disappeared. You can have a fully functional development environment running in under ten minutes, consuming roughly eighty megabytes of RAM and starting in about a hundred milliseconds.
For architects and team leads, this convergence is worth paying attention to. Terminal-native workflows mean consistent tooling across all environments, from local development to CI/CD pipelines to remote servers. The portability story is compelling: every developer uses the same tools the same way, whether on macOS, Linux, Windows, or working remotely via SSH. The freedom from vendor lock-in is real — these are mostly open-source tools you can inspect, fork, and modify.
What's missing from this narrative, though, is the cost of migration. Teams deeply invested in VSCode extensions, IntelliJ-specific tooling, or GUI-based debugging workflows face a non-trivial transition. The article paints a utopian picture but doesn't address the organizational friction of shifting an entire team's workflow. Not every developer wants to configure their editor through Lua scripts, and that's a legitimate preference.
Link: The Rise of Terminal Tools
TLDR: Chrome 145 DevTools brings significant performance debugging improvements including soft navigation visibility in trace views for SPAs, more precise line-level profiler timings, a new render-blocking column in the Network panel, and an enhanced DevTools MCP server with auto-connection.
Chrome 145's DevTools update is substantial, and it targets pain points that frontend developers deal with daily. The headline feature for single-page application developers is soft navigation markers in the Performance panel's trace view. If you've ever struggled to understand performance characteristics of client-side route transitions in React, Next.js, or similar frameworks, this finally gives you visibility into what was previously a black box.
The line-level profiler now delivers accurate timings even for minified and pretty-formatted code. This is a bigger deal than it sounds — previously, profiler data for production-like code was often misleading because line mappings didn't account for minification. A major optimization also reduces UI lag during trace interaction by eliminating redundant event sorting, which means working with large performance traces should feel noticeably snappier.
The Network panel gains a new "Render blocking" column that identifies resources preventing page painting. This is directly actionable for performance optimization — you can now see at a glance which CSS files, scripts, or other resources are blocking your First Paint without needing to cross-reference waterfall charts manually. Individual network request throttling is now enabled by default, letting you simulate delays on specific resources without throttling everything.
The DevTools MCP server progressed from version 0.11.0 to 0.14.0, introducing auto-connection with the auto-connect flag for automatic Chrome instance discovery, unified emulation tools for geolocation and network conditions, and preserved logs functionality across navigations. This is an interesting convergence with the terminal tools story — Chrome DevTools is becoming AI-agent friendly.
For teams and architects, the CSS starting-style rule debugging being enabled by default is worth noting. If your team is adopting entry animations with the new CSS starting-style specification, you now have first-class debugging support. The AI Assistance feature supporting multimodal input through clipboard image pasting also signals where browser tooling is headed.
Link: What's new in DevTools (Chrome 145)
TLDR: Warcraftcn-ui is an open-source React component library built on shadcn/ui that brings Warcraft III's iconic RTS aesthetic to modern web applications. Copy-paste ready, fully accessible, and MIT licensed.
If you grew up building Ziggurats and training Grunts in Warcraft III, this project will hit you right in the nostalgia. Warcraftcn-ui is a collection of accessible, retro-inspired UI components that draw from classic real-time strategy game aesthetics, built by OrcDev and already sitting at five hundred forty-six stars on GitHub.
The approach follows the shadcn/ui philosophy: these are not components you install as a dependency. You copy them into your project and own them entirely. They're built on top of shadcn/ui, which itself uses Radix UI primitives for accessibility and Tailwind CSS for styling. This means you get accessible, keyboard-navigable components that happen to look like they belong in Azeroth.
The library currently provides a growing set of components designed to work with React and Next.js. The documentation at warcraftcn.com shows how to integrate them, and the copy-paste model means zero vendor lock-in. If you want to modify the Warcraft aesthetic to fit your project, you just edit the files directly.
For architects and teams, this project is an interesting case study in the power of the shadcn/ui ecosystem. The copy-paste component model has spawned an entire category of themed component libraries — there's even a RuneScape-themed one now. If your team is considering building an internal design system, the shadcn/ui approach of owning your components rather than depending on a third-party library is worth evaluating. The tradeoff is clear: you get complete control but you also own all maintenance.
What's worth questioning here is the practical application beyond novelty. A Warcraft-themed UI is fantastic for gaming community projects, portfolio sites, or hackathons, but it's not something you'd ship in a production enterprise application. The real value might be in studying how the shadcn/ui component model enables rapid themed customization.
Link: Warcraftcn UI on GitHub
TLDR: Starting with React before mastering JavaScript fundamentals and browser APIs creates knowledge gaps that hinder long-term developer growth. Learn vanilla JavaScript first, then adopt React as a solution to real problems.
This is an argument that surfaces every few months, and while it's not exactly groundbreaking, it remains perpetually relevant as new developers enter the field. The post by Goodluck Jesse Kassa on daily.dev makes the case that jumping straight into React without understanding the underlying platform is like learning to drive an automatic before understanding how a car works.
The core problem is real: React abstracts away DOM manipulation, state management, and rendering in ways that beginners often don't appreciate. When something breaks — and it will — developers who skipped the fundamentals struggle to debug because they don't understand what React is doing under the hood. They know how to call useState but don't understand closures. They can set up React Router but can't explain how the History API works.
The recommended learning path is straightforward: master JavaScript fundamentals, learn browser APIs, build vanilla JavaScript applications, then adopt React. When you follow this path, React transforms from magical syntax into a practical tool that solves problems you've actually experienced. You understand why we need a virtual DOM because you've felt the pain of manual DOM manipulation. You appreciate component state because you've managed global state yourself.
For team leads and architects hiring junior developers, this raises an important question about what you actually value in candidates. A developer who can explain event delegation and closures but is new to React is arguably more valuable than one who can scaffold a Next.js application but can't explain why useEffect runs when it does. Consider structuring your onboarding to include fundamentals review, not just framework-specific training.
That said, let's push back on this a bit. The "learn the fundamentals first" argument can be taken too far. Not every React developer needs to understand the full browser rendering pipeline or the History API internals. The abstraction exists precisely so developers can be productive without knowing every detail. The real skill is knowing when to dig deeper — and React tutorials that skip fundamentals entirely are the actual problem, not the framework itself.
Link: Learning React First Is Actually a Mistake
TLDR: React Wheel Picker is a free, open-source React component that provides iOS-like wheel selection with smooth inertia scrolling, infinite loop support, and seamless shadcn/ui integration. Install with a single shadcn CLI command.
Mobile-style wheel pickers have always been one of those UI patterns that looks simple but is deceptively complex to implement well. Chánh Đại's React Wheel Picker nails the feel: natural touch scrolling with smooth inertia, mouse drag support for desktop, infinite loop scrolling, and full keyboard navigation with type-ahead search.
What makes this component stand out from the dozens of wheel picker libraries on npm is the integration story. You install it with a single command: npx shadcn add ncdai/wheel-picker. It drops into your project as an unstyled component that follows shadcn/ui conventions, meaning it inherits your existing theme and design system without any visual conflicts. The component supports React with Vite, Laravel, React Router, Next.js, Astro, TanStack Start, TanStack Router, and Gatsby.
The implementation handles all the edge cases you'd expect from a production-ready picker: touch physics that feel natural rather than mechanical, proper inertia calculations, infinite looping that doesn't jump or glitch, and accessibility through keyboard navigation. The project is backed by the Vercel OSS Program, which adds a layer of credibility and likely helps with hosting and CI costs.
For teams building applications with date pickers, time selectors, or any scrollable list selection, this is worth evaluating as a replacement for native select elements or custom dropdown implementations. The iOS wheel pattern is familiar to users from mobile platforms and can provide a more engaging selection experience, particularly on touch devices or in mobile web applications.
The one thing to consider is whether the wheel picker pattern makes sense for your use case. On mobile, it's natural and intuitive. On desktop, it can feel out of place if the rest of your UI follows standard web conventions. Think carefully about where this component adds genuine UX value versus where it's just novelty.
Link: React Wheel Picker