I work on a computer all day. I do things from query databases, making a lot of HTTP API calls, parsing, transforming and generally munging structured and unstructured data of all kinds. I edit and compile code. I remote into servers and automate a lot of my daily tasks. I take, organize, search and refine notes.
I prefer terminal-based tools because I can use them on any of my machines remotely without much hassle. I also find that I'm just more efficient with text-input and keyboard driven interactions, especially if modal editing is available.
Fortunately for me we're the golden age of terminal-based tools, IMHO.
Anyway, with all that said, I present the long list of tools I use daily and why I like them:
Arch Linux
I won't go into too much detail here. Rolling release, Arch Wiki and AUR. I run Arch with ZFS on 4 machines. My desktop install is over 10 years old at this point. I rarely encounter any sort of bleeding edge breakage that people seem to think is common with Arch.
KDE Plasma
It has just enough shortcuts for window management that I can do 90% of what I would do with tiling WMs like i3 and Sway and I prefer not having to spend time configuring one of the various i3bar-etc applications to get the system tray and all that working right.
KDE just works, it looks nice and lets me configure it as much as I want.
I do find myself WM/DE-curious and I try other things from time to time. PaperWM is on my short list to try out.
Emacs
Won't elaborate here much either - I like Emacs mostly because of Evil mode and Org mode but there is a long-tail of other packages and configurability that also make me prefer it over Vim or Neovim.
I still use Neovim for quick one-off edits from time to time but 90% of my day is spent in Emacs.
I think newer editors like Helix are interesting, but without full Org mode support I couldn't imagine switching.
Nushell
Nushell is a modern shell written in Rust with first class support for structured data, syntax and semantics that draw a nice balance between reasonable programming language and an ergonomic shell UX.
I find myself being willing to automate more complex tasks using Nushell than I would with Z shell or Bash.
VisiData
VisiData is a nice terminal spreadsheet and CSV tool. I don't have to create a lot of spreadsheets but I do have to find data in them and CSVs often enough, for work, that having something that fits my normal workflow here is really nice.
While I don't think VisiData will write to XLSX files, it will let you edit sheets and save them as CSV or TSV.
This tool was the initial motivation for writing this post.
Konsole
Nothing super interesting to say about it. It just works.
All the modern terminals are nice, I like WezTerm, Alacritty and Kitty. I switch between them for one reason or another at different times, but I currently have Konsole bound to my terminal shortcut in KDE so it's my terminal of choice.
Unison
Firefox
There's not a whole lot, I think, that differentiates the browsers from one another these days
Chrome Emacs
Chrome Emacs is both a Chrome and Firefox extension that lets you pretty seamlessly edit text areas in your browser from within Emacs. Since I find myself writing a lot at work these days, it's nice to be able to edit story details in Shortcut from Emacs with nice modal editing.