My coding setup (2022)

Nicolas Hansse — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 17:13:00 +0000

Intro

For my first post on dev.to, i would like to share with everyone what's inside my Macbook Pro.

About myself

To make it short, I learned coding since I was 12, i studied until I get an engineer diploma, and since then, i'm a happy FullStack JS developer (4 years).

However I'm also very curious and I love learning new skills/languages and apply them in my daily life. This mindset helped me to be autonomous on my work and achieve tasks even if didn't have the required skills.

My Macbook Pro

Here is the description of my mac with the latest version of macos. So now you know all tools presented can run on macos 12.2.

Terminal

Iterm2

Iterm2 is for me an excellent terminal, as a developer, the choice of your terminal is kind of decisive. You won't change it until you get a new computer or a co-worker recommend you a new one like Hyper.

So i recommand Iterm2 because it's a well known terminal, so i you hit a bug, you have more chance to find a solution.

ZSH + Oh my zsh

No surprise here, if you never heard about zsh go replace you default bash my this shell, it offer a plugin system where the community coded a bunch of very useful tools

Also don't forget to install OhmyZsh it will help you to install plugins made by the community.

And here a list of my favorite plugins:

zsh-autosuggestions (autocomplete based on latest command usage)
alias-finder (find alias for a command, usefull if you created one that you do not remember)
kubectl (aliases for kubectl)
nx-completion (autocompletion for nx commands)

You can explore a list a awesome plugins made by the community

Command line tools

Here is a list of awesome command line applications i used everyday and can help you on you daily work

Mcfly - fly through your shell history (goodbye history | grep XXX 👋 )
bat 🦇 - A cat(1) clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration
jless - a command-line JSON viewer

My IDE - VSCode

I do not have a lot of plugins installed on vscode but i use a lot 2 of them:

GitLens - the most usefull plugin to visual and manage git repository (and also for git blame 😈)
GitHub AutoPilot - the best plugin so far, Once you start using it you won't be able to live without. This plugin is a just awesome and help me a lot when i try to write code other than Javascript and i'm not sure how to do something in shell/rust etc..

Productivity App

I a big fan of automation, If i can automate something boring easily i'll do it no matter how much time it takes to achieve it.

Depending on the task i'll use no-code tools to achieve it. The advantage is that you can share your workflows with Muggles and help everyone.

Alfred 4

Alfred is a no-code tool which replace your classic Spotlight. (⌘ + Space) (it can also be binded to another hotkey combo if you want to keep Spotlight)

I 'll talk about the paid version (Starting at 29£ for lifetime License) the free version is not very interesting.

So what can we do with that ? A good answer would be an exemple of usage.

Let's say you have to write a command line tool which display the latest price of bitcoin. A good start would be creating a shell script and curl an open api which return the price. And you are right, that maybe 80% of devs would do.
However your co-worker, a Muggle heard about your script and also want to use it, but within an interface because it doesn't know how to even open a terminal.

That where Alfred is a great tool because it will add a pseudo-interface on top your shell script and your co-worker will never have to configure it.

✅ Pros

Modular (with workflow system)
Very popular tool (exist since 2010, and latest major version in 2019)
Very easy to use
Has an AppleScript integration

🔴 Cons

Might looks ugly
No reusable bricks (you have to duplicate everything)
the Price (cheap, but can be a con)
not open source

Conclusion

I hope my setup for 2022 will help developers which are looking for ideas to increase their productivity and / or improve their daily work.

Let me know if you have questions or suggestions :D

DEV Community: Nicolas Hansse