I wouldn't call myself a "wizard", but I do spend every work day in a terminal and have done so for many years. There is nothing fancy about my setup: I use gnome terminal, bash, and my own little editor `ozette`, every setting basically default.
I have not yet tried Copilot, nor felt much curiosity about it; bulk generation of likely-incorrect code I don't really understand is not a service I can imagine much use for.
mostly using tmux + zsh configured via dotfiles in a git repo[1]; zsh offers some great plugins, for example fzf-tab[2]. My opinion is to not overcook it, a shell should be fairly lightweight and minimal.
In terms of AI tools in the terminal, I've also tried a few, but nothing stuck so far...
[^1]: https://github.com/AlexW00/.config [^2]: https://github.com/Aloxaf/fzf-tab
- I use normal ubuntu terminal with tmux(super useful stuff). - For shell I use fish + oh-my-fish (I feel it is better than zsh).
Konsole + zsh + zcomet
Months ago i used zplug, but its not developed anymore and zcomet is much faster, since it compiles the files.
I use Kitty as a terminal (on Linux) and fish as a shell (on both Linux and macOS). No AI (why do you need AI? Just use `tldr` or `--help`).
Kitty is GPU accelerated and has excellent support for displaying images in the terminal, using the Kitty graphics protocol. It also has its own keyboard protocol which works around many limitations you'd normally encounter with modkeys and TUI apps.
Also waiting to check out GhosTTY, which is supposed to be super fast (comes out next month).
As for the shell, I too hsed zsh in the past, but I switched away from zsh due to how slow and bloated it became.
fish is fast, and stuff like oh-my* is completely optional, because fish has many of the features zsh users would normally install manually.
The only plugins I use in fish are fisher (a fish package manager) and tide (a really fast, customisable asynchronous prompt).
xfce4-terminal + bash. The only tweak for the terminal is a custom light theme, the only tweak for the shell is a custom PS1 to show current git branch and time.
Bash in Terminal.app on macOS, with a bunch of rc files that have been evolving with me over many years. My own terminal palette. My own colorscheme in Vim. Fira Mono.
And no "AI" bullshit whatsoever.
Blink shell on iPad Pro, tmux, plain bash with a few aliases, vim with few plugins. No AI, no shell plugins, no junk on the screen to make it into a Christmas lights display. If your "shell interactions" feel slow try unloading some of the baggage. If you find the shell "archaic" try to reframe that as tried and tested and well-understood.
The beauty of using the command line shell comes from the simplicity of plain text and direct interaction with the tools, not from trying to create a GUI experience or polluting it with Copilot assistance.
I don't know about your setup with emacs, but both vim and bash can execute a line displayed in the terminal without adding anything to them.