The initial shear field plays a central role in the formation of large-scale structures, and in shaping the geometry, morphology, and topology of the cosmic web. We discuss a recent theoretical framework for the shear tensor, termed the ‘peak/dip picture’, which accounts for the fact that halos/voids may form from local extrema of the density field – rather than from random spatial positions; the standard Doroshkevich's formalism is generalized, to include correlations between the density Hessian and shear field at special points in space around which halos/voids may form. We then present the ‘peak/dip excursion-set-based’ algorithm, along with its most recent applications – merging peaks theory with the standard excursion set approach.