Personalized Development Environment (PDE) is a concept borrowed from a talk given by TJ DeVries. He used the term to refer to editors (such as Vim and NeoVim) that are more than just text editors. However, I would say a good editor is just the core of a comfortable development environment, just as Linux is the core of the operating system distribution. A personalized development environment should also include the whole ecosystem.
Configuring and reproducing a PDE is hard. When I have to migrate from one computer to another, it has always been hard for me to remember all the toolings that I use, let alone restoring all the configurations I made. Instead of trying to write down every step I take, I decide to manage the process with code as much as possible.
This project maintains the instructions, toolings and configurations needed to quickly reproduce a PDE on any machine. It is just for myself and my workflow, but if you are reading this, hope you could also learn something here.
On having a new machine, the first thing to do is to install a package manager. This enables easy installation for all the following utilities. For macOS, this should be Homebrew:
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
Afterwards, install the Helix editor, the Fish shell, the Alacritty terminal, and the Rectangle window manager:
brew install helix fish alacritty rectangle
Install all the nice utilities in the background:
brew install croc dua-cli dust eva fd fzf hexyl jless just mdbook nomino pastel pueue ripgrep sd starship tealdeer tokei zoxide
Finally, in a Fish shell, install Fisher for managing fish plugins:
curl -sL https://git.io/fisher | source && fisher install jorgebucaran/fisher
Note that all the configurations are wrapped as a custom fish plugin within this repo. Install all of them with Fisher:
fisher install yxonic/pde
This will install:
- Custom shell functions such as
proxy
. - Paths and other common variables.
- My favorite shell aliases.
- Configuration files for other tools such as
hx
.
The helix editor needs some configuration to support as much languages as possible. Simply run:
hx -g fetch && hx -g build
Install rustup
to manage Rust toolchain with ease:
brew install rustup
Python development is best done in virtual environments. Some of my favorite
virtual environment management tools are virtualfish
and conda
.
For python package development, I would use virtualfish
with poetry
. They
are both installed with system python:
brew install python
pip3 install virtualfish
vf addplugins auto_activation
curl -sSL https://install.python-poetry.org | python3 -
For scientific research, I would install miniconda
, since it provides many
ready-to-use scientific packages and libraries.
To enable best editing experience, install following tools inside the virtual environment for helix to pick up:
pip install python-lsp-server python-lsp-black python-lsp-ruff
I like to manage node versions with nvm.fish
:
set -U nvm_default_version lts
set -U nvm_default_packages pnpm
fisher install jorgebucaran/nvm.fish
nvm install lts
To install LaTeX environment:
brew install mactex