There is a great plugin that combines Vim and Tmux is a special way: tslime
https://github.com/kikijump/tslime.vim

If you open a tmux window and then split it into two panes you can do the following:
Open Vim in one pane and a language interpreter (irb, python, lua, clj, …) in the other.
Write some code fragment in Vim and press ctrl+c ctrl+c while the cursor is still in the block of code you have just written. This block of code is then inserted to the other pane and immediately executed by the language interpreter (in the case of python you usually need to add another newline).

The first time you press ctrl+c ctrl+c tslime asks you where it should paste the stuff. You then have to select the session, the window and finally the pane.

This plugin is great for writing and directly testing code fragments. And if you made a typo it’s much easier to quickly fix it and send the code back to the interpreter.

As for my own top 3: Vim, all the compilers and interpreters, LaTeX

1. ed (my favorite text editor)
2. screen with vertical split patch
3. MirBSD korn shell (mksh for me is like zsh for some. I just love hot it works and I can’t find any reason not to use it)

1) tmux
2) mercurial (or python headers and pip, with which I install latest hg)
3) htop

Hmm well, aside from the ones you listed, lets add Emacs, rlwrap, and sshfs.

Anyone reading this know what Emacs is. Rlwrap is a program that adds instant readline support to any program. Just type “rlwrap ” and there you go. I do a lot of lisp programming so typing this really nice when starting a REPL.

Also, sshfs is the easiest way to securely mount a remote filesystem. You can use without root permissions and you can mount any directory you can reach through a regular ssh session.

As a Debian user, I automatically get everything marked essential, and only those since I always do a netinst. That includes wget, GPG, and all the basic shell tools you said don’t count anyway.

The first two are obvious and come right out of your book. Like you, Luke, I need my text editor, so I install Emacs 24 — 24 because my Emacs configuration currently requires it. However, first I install Git so that I can pull down all my configuration files.

The third one is a little trickier. Since you mentioned it, screen and tmux are nice but I can get by without them. I’d probably pick a development tool like a compiler, etc. Emacs can fill this role pretty well on its own, being a personal Lisp machine, but it’s inadequete for many kinds of things (slow, limited to 29-bit integers). While OpenJDK or GCC sounds useful, they’re really hard to use without a build system (Ant, Maven, make, etc), which would require at least one additional package.

So, right now I’d pick SBCL to get myself a Common Lisp environment, which I can trivially integrate with Emacs. It comes with a sort-of build system, ASDF, so that’s covered.

Scott’s mention of Keychain was right in line with my thoughts. I initially considered that as my third package, but I can live without it if I had to. A dev tool is more important for me.

Well, you’ve managed to hit my exact top 3 as well :)

So I’ll add three more:
Ranger file manager is a huge timesaver when browsing a directory tree looking for something. I keep an instance open all the time (in tmux of course!) next to a regular terminal window. It’s got a great set of default file-opener rules as well.

Rsync — for obvious reasons! It for some reason isn’t installed by default on Arch.

Keychain — manages all my ssh keys to multiple boxes. It’s basically a wrapper for ssh-agent and gpg-agent that makes configuration easier.

Scott