Development Environment

My preferred development environment

• Terminals

  • Linux - Alacritty

  • macOS - iTerm

  • Windows - Windows Terminal

• Shell: zsh

  • oh-my-zsh: https://ohmyz.sh/

• Fonts:

  • Fira Code: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

• Starship Prompt: https://starship.rs/

• Nord Theme: https://www.nordtheme.com/

• Visual Studio Code

  • GitLens

  • Bracket Pair Colorizer

  • Remote - SSH

  • LiveShare

• CLI Tools

  • exa (ls replacement)

  • starship (shell prompt, mentioned above)

  • More here: https://zaiste.net/posts/shell-commands-rust/

• macOS apps:

  • Rectangle (formerly Spectacle): https://rectangleapp.com/

Starship Prompt

Starship Prompt is a binary CLI tool that outputs a set of useful information in your prompt. The prompt is the part of the terminal that gets printed out before your cursor, usually a # or a $. Many prompt interfaces designed today usually feature displaying version information of your environment for Node.js, Python, Conda, Cargo, etc.

Why would one use starship over bullet train or other prompt tools?

• Starship prompt is written in the rust programming language and compiled as a binary so it should be preferred over bash variants.

  • Why rust? Many cli tools written in rust are faster and take advantage of a terminal's font colors and makes the text easier to read. Of course there's nothing wrong with using the original tooling and it could all just end up as hype.

• It support for a lot of the programming environments out of the box.

• It uses emoji.

Fira Code

Fira Code is a font designed to make it easier to read code. It uses ligatures to turn multiple character operators such as != into the mathematical symbol ≠. Since ligatures are only applied during the render stage, the underlying code stays the same and the amount of space used is the same as monospace length.

Drawbacks

• Ligatures must be manually turned on and preference tweaking is required.

• Some ligatures don't make sense or cannot be applied across programming languages. (i.e. should >> change in C++ if they represent nested angled brackets like in vector<vector<int>> and is not the right shift operator?)

Nord Theme

Nord theme is a dark color scheme to make it easier to read code.

Drawbacks

• The current background and comment text color are too similar and make it harder to read comments.

• For people who like really dark backgrounds, Nord theme is arguably not dark enough.