When I started cleaning up my Linux workflow, I realized something obvious that I had ignored for years. Productivity didn’t come from installing more tools. It came from choosing a small set that worked together without friction. Before diving into the details, here is the toolkit that shaped my daily development routine and actually stayed installed on my machine.
1. Code editors / IDEs
- VS Code / VSCodium
- JetBrains IDEs (IntelliJ, PyCharm, WebStorm)
- Neovim
2. Version control & repositories
- Git (CLI first)
- GitHub / GitLab (for collaboration)
3. Shell, terminal, productivity
- Fish or Zsh
- Kitty, Tilix, or Terminator
- tmux (session management and panes)
4. Automated testing & CI
- pytest, Jest, PHPUnit (depending on language)
- GitHub Actions or GitLab CI (basic pipelines)
5. Containers & environments
- Docker or Podman
- docker-compose for multi-service setups
6. Debugging, profiling, databases
- gdb / lldb
- Valgrind
- DBeaver or DataGrip
7. Design and architecture thinking
- Excalidraw
- PlantUML
- draw.io
8. AI helpers (used carefully)
- GitHub Copilot
- Codeium
- Cursor or similar AI coding assistants
9. Two practical stacks
- Free stack: VS Code or Neovim, Git, tmux, Docker, CI, DBeaver, Excalidraw
- Paid-plus stack: JetBrains IDEs, Copilot, DataGrip, managed CI minutes
If any of these tools catch your attention, I break them down in more detail in the full guide, with examples of how they fit into real projects.
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