It's been a few years since I wrote my previous post, Development Environment Opinions, and I've found new things, refined my tastes, etc. So here are my new and improved development environment opinions!
Operating system
I love Linux. It does what I tell it to do and respects me as a user.
If I could wave a magic wand and update corporate IT policies I would use Fedora Silverblue for my professional work. It's stable, performant, and atomic.
In the meantime macOS has been good enough for development. It's generally stable and performant but they've been taking notes from Microsoft's theory of consent over the years which is really annoying.
Ghostty 👻
Terminal emulators just keep getting better and better. Ghostty is the latest and greatest in my opinion. Also love that it's available cross platforms so I don't have to maintain as much macOS vs Linux stuff in my dotfiles.
tmux
Terminal multiplexer. Lets you open multiple terminal shells within a terminal shell. Sounds a bit weird if you're not familiar with it but it's effectively like tabs in a terminal emulator but better in every way.
Neovim
Performant, customizable, open source.
Here is a short list of some of my favorite plugins:
- telescope.nvim for arbitrary file navigation
- harpoon for fast targeted navigation
- oil.nvim for a simple but visually pleasant file explorer
- Which Key for helping my zug brain learn new things I add and remember old things I don't use often
- STCursorword for cusor word highlighting which is a small and very subjective thing but I like it
fish 🐟
Fish does most of the basic things I have come to expect from a terminal right out of the box.
I used bash and then zsh for years while accruing an ever growing list of
plugins for basic functionality that ended up slowing the start time. When I
looked into improving my setup's performance I noticed several of my primary
plugins were reimplementing functionality from fish. I tried fish and pretty
much never looked back.
I use the fisher plugin manager from Jorge Bucaran. Check out
my dotfiles for a list of plugins I use.
Starship 🚀
Fancy shell prompt. Fast! Colorful!
eza
Fancy ls replacement. Fast! Colorful!