For my development setup I typically rely on Development Containers which works very UI centric. Your Ide discovers the .devcontainer folder and boots an edit container and starts whatever you have defined in your docker-compose.yml file. This is great for sharing, I wrote about it, read for a refresher.

In a terminal centric world this is a heavy approach and I want options

Multiplex your terminal

My goal: with a single script start quarkus dev, twice npm run dev and a database (Apache CouchDB, glad you asked). They all need to run in the foreground, so I can keep an eye on them. This precludes simply using & to run them in the background.

Enter tmux. The wiki describes it: "tmux is a terminal multiplexer. It lets you switch easily between several programs in one terminal, detach them (they keep running in the background) and reattach them to a different terminal." Claude described it like this (might contain emscripten):

!!! info Claude's take on tmux
Old habits die hard: you open a terminal, start a long running task, your SSH (Secure Shell) connection drops and your task dies with it. Enter tmux, the terminal multiplexer. It sits between your terminal and your shell sessions, so the sessions live on the server (or your machine), not in the window you happen to be looking at. Close the laptop, reconnect from the coffee shop, run tmux attach and everything is exactly where you left it.
Multiplexing is the second trick: one terminal window hosts multiple sessions, each with multiple windows (think tabs), each split into panes. API server on the left, logs on the right, a shell at the bottom — all navigated by keyboard, no mouse gymnastics required. Everything hangs off a prefix key, Ctrl-b by default, which the seasoned crowd promptly remaps to Ctrl-a (a habit inherited from GNU screen, tmux's venerable predecessor).
The price of admission is a modest set of keyboard shortcuts and, optionally, a ~/.tmux.conf to bend it to your will. The payoff: sessions that survive disconnects, scripted development environments that launch your entire workspace with one command, and even pair programming by attaching two people to the same session. As usual YMMV.

Code pedigree is more important than ever with the ever increasing rate of supply chain attacks. Setting up code signing are a few steps, recorded here for reference.

Choice of key formats

While you could pick an ssh or x509 key, I shall stick to gpg and the Ed25519 algorythm.

Act 1 - get macOS ready

When you followed earlier advice you are good to go. If not, install Homebrew and dependencies

brew install gh gpg pinentry-mac

# setup pinentry
mkdir -p ~/.gnupg
chmod 700 ~/.gnupg
echo "pinentry-program $(brew --prefix)/bin/pinentry-mac" >> ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf
gpgconf --kill gpg-agent

Act 2 - create the key

This creates a signing key that lasts for 2 years. Make sure to get the eMail right. After creation we extract the key id.

gpg --batch --quick-generate-key "John Doe <[email protected]>" ed25519 sign
TARGET_EMAIL="[email protected]"
GPG_KEY_ID=$(gpg --list-secret-keys --with-colons "$TARGET_EMAIL" 2>/dev/null \
             | awk -F: '$1=="sec" {print $5; exit}')
echo Your key id is $GPG_KEY_ID

You also can do that manually running gpg --list-secret-keys --keyid-format=long and look for the string after the / in the line starting with sec.

Act 3 - configure your local git

Make sure to get the eMail right

git config --global user.name "John Doe"
git config --global user.email "$TARGET_EMAIL"
git config --global user.signingkey "$GPG_KEY_ID"
git config --global commit.gpgsign true
git config --global tag.gpgsign true
git config --global pull.rebase true

Act 4 - Let github know

Display the public key:

gpg --armor --export $GPG_KEY_ID

Go to your Github key settings, click on "New GPG key" and paste it

Act 5 - overwrite for individual repos (optional)

git config user.name "John Doe"
git config user.email "$TARGET_EMAIL"
git config user.signingkey "$GPG_KEY_ID"
git config commit.gpgsign true
git config tag.gpgsign true
git config pull.rebase true

For adventurous souls there is a setup script available to automate this. Use at your own risk.

As usual YMMV