Terminal and CLI Productivity with Windsurf

Over the last few lessons, our Snake game project has undergone a remarkable transformation. It began as a simple prototype generated by Cascade, evolved through a major architectural refactor, and was ultimately connected to a full stack leaderboard service. It is no longer merely an experiment; it is a real application. And real applications demand professional practices. This lesson marks a turning point for the project. We are going to give it the respect it deserves by establishing the kind of robust, efficient tooling that distinguishes hobby projects from production-grade software. We will spend our time in the command line, a space often associated with friction: remembering obscure commands, looking up flags, and performing repetitive manual steps.

But with Windsurf, the terminal is not a barrier to flow; it’s another canvas for AI collaboration. We’ll use Windsurf’s AI capabilities to set up version control, automate our run scripts, and commit our work with intelligent assistance, all without ever leaving our flow state to Google a command again.

Terminal commands with Windsurf Command

Terminal commands usually have a specific, direct instruction. For this, Windsurf provides a powerful, focused tool called Windsurf Command. Let’s focus on what is perhaps its most transformative application for day-to-day productivity: its integration directly into the command line. Let’s walk through a few concrete, everyday scenarios that developers face constantly.

Uncovering project history

Imagine a bug has just been reported in our Snake game, and you suspect it was introduced when we first refactored the game’s state management. If you were using git, you would need to find the exact commit where state.js was created. Instead of fumbling with git log flags, you can just ask.

In the terminal of your Snake game project, you could press Cmd+I and type:

Show me the git log for the file state.js

Windsurf’s AI understands you’re not just looking for commits that mention the file, but the file’s history itself. It will likely generate a command like:

git log --follow -- state.js

The --follow flag is crucial here. It continues listing the history of ...