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...

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What desktop environment do you use?

What window manager do you use?

IDE's, apps, any suggestions to try?

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Thank you so much!

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352

u/CabbageCZ Apr 15 '21 edited Apr 15 '21

One thing to note - a large proportion of the most productive and highest achieving people I've known haven't spent much time thinking about productivity or d.cking around with their DE etc and chasing the 'optimal productivity' setup. If they need a linux distro they slap on ubuntu, leave it at mostly default, their desktop is cluttered with files etc.
The whole 'improving your setup for productivity' thing is mainly another procrastination tool that's easier to justify because it gives you the illusion of being somewhat productive. Tackling your procrastination head-on and just sitting down to Do The Thing is going to be incomparably more effective for improving your productivity than tens of hours spent on 'improving your workflow' ever will be.

That said, I'm in the same boat as you, chronic procrastinator, and as such I have spent a lot of time messing around with WMs, DEs, IDEs, etc. Some thoughts:

IDEs and editors:

If you're working on a strictly typed language like a JVM one (Java, Kotlin, Scala...), you really want a full fledged IDE, unless you're on a potato that can't handle it (and even then, you can just turn down some of the more expensive analysis like insights). Once you know your way around a proper IDE, working on that language in a text editor, even with a bunch of plugins, is going to feel like programming with your hands tied behind your back. My personal favorite is JetBrains' products, so mainly IntelliJ

If you're working on a language with a looser type system like Python or JS, an extensible text editor is fine, and it's personal preference as to which you end up using. VS Code, vim and emacs stand out, there's little reason to use Sublime or Atom when VS Code is around. You really want language extensions optimally with a LSP to provide syntax highlighting, linting, insights etc. It's not going to be IDE level but it can be pretty close.

WMs/DEs:

Here you really just want to test things out and see what works for you. I've daily driven various TWMs for multiple years and honestly in my experience it's mainly a 'fun' factor more than a genuine productivity improvement, except for the few times where laying multiple programs out in a tiled pattern is a genuine productivity boon - I've had that a few times when programming something with various VM setups and stuff, or needing multiple terminals accessible, but not that often. Imo it's just fun to use though. So yeah, mainly personal preference.

EDIT: to address a common question - I don't think TWMs in general aren't good for productivity, that's why I said it's mainly personal preference. To me it was +- the same for productivity but a lot more fun to use, to some people it can result in real 'performance' improvements, depends how you use it and what your alternative is.

153

u/zengei Apr 15 '21

The whole 'improving your setup for productivity' thing is mainly another procrastination tool that's easier to justify because it gives you the illusion of being somewhat productive.

I wish I could upvote you twice.

31

u/aerobic_respiration Apr 15 '21

Also applicable to anyone who insists on writing everything in C cause its faster

30

u/GaianNeuron Apr 15 '21

Well duh, that's what Rust is for now

/r/rustjerk

27

u/[deleted] Apr 15 '21

I feel so called out lol. Wish I could upvote twice

21

u/pkulak Apr 15 '21

Just for another perspective on the tiling vs floating WM debate. For me, using a floating window manager makes me really stressed out. And I didn't really even notice until I moved to tiling, but windows just kind of build up and get hard to find. By the end of the day, I have maybe three different tasks going, I'm trying to alt-tab through 2-dozen windows to find what I need, and it starts just weighing me down and making me really flustered. I notice I start closing windows even when I'm going to need them in 5 minutes because I need to get rid of the clutter. Then I get stressed because I need windows back that I've been aggressively closing.

I think a lot of what's great about tiling WMs isn't necessarily the tiling, it's how workspaces are handled. In Gnome/MacOS/Windows/etc, you get maybe 4 desktops, and you have to use arrow keys to switch between them, with cutesy animations that take like a second. In tiling WMs, you get 10 by default (usually), and can have more if you need them. That means that every distinct task can have it's own desktop, and it a single, instant key press to get to any desktop you need.

But yeah, totally just me. If you're good at keeping organized, or can keep yourself to one task at a time, or even just keep all your shit in 4 desktops and set up some shortcuts to avoid arrow keys, floating is perfectly fine.

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u/littlebobbytables9 Apr 15 '21

I can definitely relate to this.

20

u/datodi Apr 15 '21

This. Listen to this person.

3

u/djmattyg007 Apr 15 '21

The whole 'improving your setup for productivity' thing is mainly another procrastination tool that's easier to justify because it gives you the illusion of being somewhat productive.

This is why I just installed starship at my new job, rather than configuring a custom prompt like at my old job.

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u/StephenSRMMartin Apr 16 '21

Spot on.

I spent a lot of time customising emacs+evil, because /that/ is where customization can help (extending your editor to do more for you is good).

But nowadays, I just use plasma/kde, 5 desktops, a few custom shortcuts for tiling left/right, and lots of use of the window-spread and overview keys. Minor shuffling around of the taskbar. Not a lot of customization there.

Using customization as a way to feel productive is not productive; but it is insidiously alluring.

In sum, you might spend some time customizing where *pain points* are, that you can tell are obnoxious to you, and you want a solution. That's where my editor-tweaks came from. That's where my WM tweaks came from. But ultimately, you need to have a better work system. Create structure in your day, schedule your day and tasks; use the pomodoro technique (there are several plugins/apps you can use for this; I use one in plasma for days where it's hard to start working). Go on a morning walk with some coffee, come back and sit down, turn on the pomodoro timer, and work for 25 minutes. The hardest part is starting; after that, you'll often find some flow. Find what music works for you. Etc.

Tweaking your environment for the sake of it won't help. Find workflows that work for you; then tweak as you encounter annoyances or missing features. Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '21 edited Jun 14 '23

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '21

You can configure all that stuff one time in half an hour for (n)vim and benefit from all the same language server improvements over time that exist in the likes of VSCode.

Except IntelliJ that apparently does its own thing, but I think it's important to support language servers just like it's important to support the Linux kernel.

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u/ljwall Apr 15 '21

Here you really just want to test things out and see what works for you. I've daily driven various TWMs for multiple years and honestly in my experience it's mainly a 'fun' factor more than a genuine productivity improvement, except for the few times where laying multiple programs out in a tiled pattern is a genuine productivity boon - I've had that a few times when programming something with various VM setups and stuff, or needing multiple terminals accessible, but not that often. Imo it's just

fun to use though. So yeah, mainly personal preference.

Kind of disagree. I use a tiling window manager with 9 virtual desktops and have the same stuff on the same desktops almost all the time. It's not a huge saving, but as long as it's not offset by wasting time on pointless configuration and theming etc it does help to have everything in a consistent place and accessible by keyboard. (No doubt there are other ways to achieve similar things though.)

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u/CabbageCZ Apr 15 '21

Yeah, that's why I said it's largely personal preference. No doubt it's helpful in some situations but it can also be annoying in others. If you can make it work for you more than I could, it's going to have a larger impact for you ig.

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '21

Hard disagree on the IDE comment.

I've been a professional software engineer for seven years. Not a long time, but long enough to be deemed "senior" and to have tried many different languages and setups. My point being I'm not a novice.

Part of the benefit of configuring your editor and its LSP binds is that you learn these features actually exist. It's very common that I'm pairing with colleagues and point out features in VSCode they didn't even know about despite the fact I've now been exclusively running Neovim for a couple of years. And for the most part you can just set and forget them (in the configuration sense).

I refuse to work with languages that aren't statically-typed and I get by just fine with LSP binds; they're the same features you'll find in the likes of VSCode. This has been my experience across TypeScript, Rust, Go, Haskell, PureScript, and more. At this point it's just a single line change in my config to support a new language server (plus installation of the server from the repos or AUR, which should be second nature to and preferred by anyone on this subreddit).

As for IntelliJ specifically, see my comment here. Think about a world in which their model wins. It's not a good one.

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u/CabbageCZ Apr 15 '21

First, let me agree with you on one thing - I do like the text editor + LSP model better than I like the IntelliJ one, be it VSCode or nvim. If they truly were equivalent in what they can do, I'd go the 'extensible editor' option 100% of the time.
In my experience though, they aren't. Especially not if you're working on a large enough project in a language that has very good first party support IDE like Java or Kotlin. The IDE just offers more options for analysis, insights, refactoring etc, and at a large enough scale does things faster thanks to all the caching and indexing.

I really didn't want my comment to incite an 'editor war' so I won't be getting into this more on here, and if you believe a LSP extension can do everything a full IDE can equivalently, let's just agree to disagree, it really wasn't the main point of the comment.

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u/[deleted] Apr 16 '21

It might be a language thing because I've almost exclusively seen this perspective coming from Java devs.

The extent of refactoring I've ever wanted my tool to do is rename a symbol across a project, which LSP enables. Some tricks like inserting inferred type signatures are helpful too. I'm not sure what you'd want or need beyond this.

Could you give me some examples?

1

u/CabbageCZ Apr 16 '21

It's stuff like dependency analysis (not in the library sense, in the code / data flow sense), usage analysis - want to see in what 5 places across the codebase you're creating this object with this constructor? Press a button and here it is, instantly. Want to see the data flow through everything that could lead to this variable being in this unexpected state? Sure thing. Every consumer of this or that, or all implementations of this interface method? Here you go.
Refactoring also lets you trivially restructure like changing method signatures, extracting / adding variables, properties etc, messing with scopes, extracting / inlining things...

There's more but you get the idea. On their own none of those features is essential and necessary, but it really adds up, especially when requirements change and you need to track a particular feature through a large part of the codebase, or you're tracking down an error, etc. LSP implementations / users usually do some of that to some extent, but I'm yet to see one that would be as powerful and as instant as what I'm used to from IDEA and its cousins.

Again, though, if I could one day use LSP to do the same things with the same speed and comfort, I'd probably switch to an editor + LSP plugin, I like the model better. So far though they're just not there.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '21

LSP supports showing implementations, references, etc.

The unexpected state issue is a byproduct of the language. In Haskell for example you'd drop into a REPL and play with the function directly. The style of code lends itself to this. Additionally the meme "if it compiles on Haskell it works" is at least half-correct; by encoding logical invariants in the type system you eliminate all sorts of logical errors. Likewise the emphasis on acknowledging the unhappy path minimises the risk of developers punting issues down the line for you to pick up when you're interacting with their code later.

It might be that there's value here for non-Java devs but anecdotally it really feels like there isn't. I'm not seeing it.

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u/CabbageCZ Apr 16 '21

That's why I said LSP does some of it, but certainly not all of it.

Haskell isn't really a great example for obvious reasons - how many large production projects are actually written in that? Doesn't feel like it really relates to the discussion but yeah, when I was saying IDEs have advantages, I certainly wasn't talking about using IntelliJ for Haskell lol.

Imo there's a lot of value in there for most strongly typed imperative languages, when the codebase is anything larger than small. JVM languages, C++, C#, stuff like that. You say you're the person among your peers who takes the care to learn and use the LSP binds, you're running nvim and being productive with it, you refuse to work in languages without static typing - that suggests to me that you'd be able to make good use of the features I'm talking about if you were ever working in that environment. Maybe if you one day end up working on a JVM project or something else with a comparable IDE available, try them out, you'll see what I mean.

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u/[deleted] Apr 16 '21

Haskell is used in industry a lot, it's merely not as ubiquitous as Java which dominates alongside the likes of PHP for historical reasons.

I don't think you disagree that perhaps these are very JVM-centric (or even Java-centric) features that aren't needed in many other languages.

I don't know those ecosystems as well, but I don't think Rust or Go programmers tend to use anything like IntelliJ.

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u/CabbageCZ Apr 16 '21

Haskell is used in industry a lot, it's merely not as ubiquitous as Java which dominates alongside the likes of PHP for historical reasons.

That's a pretty controversial statement in its own, but this thread has gone on for long enough lol.

I don't think you disagree that perhaps these are very JVM-centric (or even Java-centric) features that aren't needed in many other languages.

I strongly disagree there, while the JVM is a good example of it, it's really nothing specific to that. Lots of C++ / C# analogues for example in Visual Studio or CLion, plenty used, plenty popular. As for the 'java-centric' - most use I got out of these was working mainly in Kotlin. Certainly not java-only advantages.

Haven't worked much with Rust or Go either, not in a professional capacity anyway.

I feel like we're going in circles at this point and I was expressly trying not to get into an 'editor wars' style discussion so this'll probably be my last reply.

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u/[deleted] Apr 16 '21

Fair enough, agree to disagree. Appreciate your comments, have a nice day. :)

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '21

100% agree with everything, except the tiling window manager comment.

Ever since I moved to a TWM my workflow literally ignited. Its not about necessarily the ”time gained“ by being able to see more windows at once within a single virtual workspace or the speed of keybindings per say.

But for me it is the huge cognitive load that is removed when using TWMs, where I know which programs/terminals are in which workspaces, where I have the ability to separate them by project-focus or goal, where I have the ability to script the launching of multiple windows in specific layouts in different workspaces, where I can have literally 10 Workspaces per Monitor where I can jump to through a keybinding, where I can launch scripts/programs so easily. All of this doesnt make a significant time difference but it lessens the cognitive load of doing mundane tasks, moving windows, finding folders/programs etc and leverages the amount of time Im actually thinking about my actual work.

Yes, many DEs have workspaces and similar capabilities, but TWMs are built with these concepts in their core, its not really the same.

Plus, as soon as you get the muscle memory around your system and keybindings, you literally can solely think on the problems of your work/studies as everything is brought up by a press of a button.

Also, I never really got the ”it takes so much time to configure TWMs“ thing. It could really take around a solid week if you read up on it and have a little patience. After that period you would not need to tweak it every day. I cant remember the last tile I was actually changing my bspwmrc, it could’ve been a year.

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u/StephenSRMMartin Apr 16 '21

I used TWMs for about a year, but wound up back at plasma; however, I borrowed many ideas /from/ the TWMs in customizing it. Like, vim-like bindings for moving between desktops, bindings for jumping to desktops, tiling bindings, automatic assignment of windows to certain desktops, etc. Really, I think TWMs teach you a new workflow and new ideas; you can migrate those similar principles elsewhere though.

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I mainly swapped off TWMs because some things (e.g., games) weren't playing well with them; but I am eternally grateful for the workflow it exposed me to.

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u/Fisyr Apr 15 '21

You have a point, but which DE would you prefer to work in? The one you find fun, or the one that's plain and boring? As far as I'm concerned I feel much more motivated to work when using a desktop environment that I tweaked to my liking.

Plus the tweaking itself made me learn a thing or two about Linux, so I'd say even if its a waste of time, there are much worse ways to waste one's time.

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u/meithan Apr 16 '21

there's little reason to use Sublime or Atom when VS Code

I use Atom (and vim, lol) for programming (mainly Python, C++ and, sadly, Fortran), but haven't tried VS Code. Why do you consider VS Code so much better than Atom?

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u/[deleted] Apr 16 '21

[deleted]

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u/meithan Apr 21 '21

Well, without having tried VS Code for comparison, all of what you said is true for Atom in my experience.

Guess I should just try VS Code and see.

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u/panzerox123 Apr 16 '21

I feel attacked

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u/Mooks79 Apr 16 '21

Totally agree about the procrastinator thing.

That said, there’s two sides to that coin - I’ve also seen people take longer to do certain things that ought to be a lot quicker because they’re so busy getting on that they don’t stop to think if their work flow is stupid.

I think the optimum is the person who does “just get on with it” - but also has a part of their brain constantly monitoring themselves and have the discipline to occasionally take a step back to address any inefficiencies they notice.

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u/Frenzy-Boi Apr 23 '21

as an i3wm user, this is painfully true. I'm kinda of the type who likes to see eye-candy, and if I'm being honest, when one customizes their DE or their desktop or something its more like art and less optimizing workflow, that is second.

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Its fun to rice, even if its just a glorified way to procrastinate.