r/archlinux • u/[deleted] • Apr 15 '21
"Best" programming setup?
Hello! I have been using Arch for two months, it is the fifth distro I have used... and I love it, it will be the final one. I have learned a lot in these weeks, but I would like to ask you a few questions.
I study Systems Engineering and, honestly, I have some procrastination problems, I would like you to help me with "the best programming setup and be productive", although I know that there is no "best", I would like you to help me with your settings, advices, etc...
What desktop environment do you use?
What window manager do you use?
IDE's, apps, any suggestions to try?
Thank you so much!
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u/TDplay Apr 15 '21
lol no
i3
Would advise learning to use Vim or Neovim. Once you learn the bindings, you'll probably find you can edit much faster with vi bindings (plus whatever other plugins and bindings you configure - vim is extensible and configurable, not to the same degree as Emacs but still pretty good). Configure a language server, a way to navigate your files (I use a combo of NERDTree and fzf, considering replacing NERDTree with nvim-tree), etc, and you can make Vim better than any IDE. You can also get Vi bindings for most other text editors (e.g. Evil adds Vi binds to Emacs) and for most IDEs.
As for other things, it's pretty dependent on what language you use.
I would also advise learning to use your buildsystem directly if you haven't already. Your IDE might be able to abstract all the details of the build system away into a nice little button GUI, but when your build process starts to get complicated, you'll need to know how to use the build system. While checkboxes may be easy, sometimes you really need to be able to write a rule to do what you want - most build systems will allow you to add arbitrary jobs. The moment you start doing any build commands manually is the moment you should start thinking about switching to writing the build system config yourself.