Development environment
I have invested far more time than I care to admit in my development environment…in fact I wrote this post specifically on slimming down my setup to a more minimal set of tools. My development environment has always been Unix-based (both in nature and philosophy), especially heavy in the CLI/shell realm. I love a good CLI tool, and try to script common things into my set up.
I have been employed at a large company, so my set up must be portable across different system types. Here are a few I have used over the years, both professionally and personally
- WSL 1 -> Ubuntu 22.04
- WSL 2 -> Arch Linux
- MacOS
- Debian
- Arch Linux
Arch has been my daily driver at home for many, many years. It offers a superb base, and allows me to do effectively whatever I want to my system without getting in the way…and I like that.
All of my configurations are managed in my dotfiles repo, which I have rebuilt a handful of times do to clutter.
I manage my dotfiles using the bare git repository method, which works very well and is essentially dependency free (important for systems like a locked-down corporate Mac).
| Tool | Category | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Arch Linux | OS | BTW |
| hyprland | Window manager | I switched between dwm and qtile for a long time, but hyprland really made it easy to get a nice looking and slick feeling WM set up, and with the benefit of Wayland |
| ghostty | Terminal | alacritty and st were my long stand-ins, but image rendering was getting painful and ghostty offer that plus extra goodies (like ligatures and dracula + JetBrains Mono out-of-the-box) |
| JetBrains Mono | Font | Excellent monospace font, great for coding and everything else. |
| Neovim | Editor | I have been a big fan of Neovim for ages, and cannot find anything else that scratches the itch the way Neovim does |
| zsh | shell | Simple, has nice extras, and gets the job done. I never liked how fish used a separate syntax, and bash lacked some of the niceities of zsh |
| fzf | CLI tool | One of the best CLI tools around. Minimal go project, lends to integrations in all sorts of useful places(including vim) |
| tmux | Terminal multiplexer | The classic. Makes terminal navigation, especially scrolling/copying, immensely more effective |
EDC
I must admit, I carry too many things in my pockets…what can I say I am a sucker for good (useful!) tools.
The old adage “carry what you use, and use what you carry” holds true, and I have whittled down the number of things I carry over the years to only useful items that I actually end up whipping out.
| Item | Category | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Kershaw Iridium | Knife | Birthday present for my brother. I have never had overly expensive knives – that ~$50-100 range hits the value sweet spot nicely |
| Leatherman Free P2 | Multi-tool | Grabbed from on sale for $90. Awesome tool, the one-handed feature is killer. Replaced my ancient Gerber Suspension |
| Coast Slayer Max Red | Flashlight | Marketplace find for $25. I grossly underestimated how useful carrying a flashlight would be. Cannot recommend enough |
| Zippo w/ butane torch insert | Lighter | Nothing special, just a Zippo from Walmart. The butane insert is super handy – burns hot and the fuel does not evaporate |