Your tools and environment

Last modified 2025-05-22 07:03

This handout is tied to the following lecture

3. Your tools and environment

Minimal setups

Note!

A cut down version of my current NeoVim setup which is still quite minimal can be found here.

If you have any other good suggestions for minimal starting points for setting up editors and development environments, send them my way and I will have a look and add them here!

Managing “dotfiles”

As the amount of tools you depend on increases and the number of computers go > 1 (e.g. when you want to change to a new machine), you probably want a nice way to manage your configuration files or so called dotfiles.

First of all you probably want to keep your dotfiles in a git repository so that they are version controlled and backed up. To do this you will need to somehow link them from this git repository to their location on your computer where they act as the configuration. This is what tools like GNU Stow does. It manages a repository of dotfiles and creates symbolic links to their intended locations. This makes getting started on a new system trivial!

Dreams of Autonomy - Stow has forever changed the way I manage my dotfiles

As a hobby project I have built my own dotfiles manager that essentially does the same thing but with additional options to have diverging dotfiles between systems and installation of extra things. Doing these type of projects allow me to try things that I usually do not get exposed to and this has helped me a lot. My next thing to do is add in this hobby project is a terminal UI using urwid to learn how urwid works since it could be useful in making TUIs for interacting with some of my analysis pipelines, but I don’t want to try it on something that complicated until I understand what it is and how it works and if it would be useful.

Editors

vim-motions

A good article about the power of vim-motions, regardless of which editor you use, is vim is not about speed.

A good starting tutorial on vim-motions can be found here:

And I like this video series on advanced motions:

VsCode

Currently my Code-OSS uses these extension

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danielk@IRF033-danielk ~> code --list-extensions
bungcip.better-toml
danielgavin.ols
gruntfuggly.todo-tree
james-yu.latex-workshop
llvm-vs-code-extensions.vscode-clangd
ms-python.black-formatter
ms-python.debugpy
ms-python.flake8
ms-python.python
redhat.vscode-yaml
streetsidesoftware.code-spell-checker
streetsidesoftware.code-spell-checker-swedish
twxs.cmake
usernamehw.errorlens
waderyan.gitblame

I really like ErrorLens together with the ms-python suite as it gives me direct feedback on bad formatting, bugs, and syntax errors. todo-tree is really helpful in navigating across large projects that use the # TODO: style syntax. I also recommend the VsCode-NeoVim extension to start learning vim-motions: that’s how I got started at one point.

There are a TON of tutorials on VsCode due to its popularity so I wont link any here.

Sublime Text

Below are a few good starting points for beginning to master Sublime text posted on a Youtube channel dedicated to Sublime Text.

NeoVim

Below is an example starting setup of nvim with most of the bells and whistles that you would want:

DevOps Toolbox - LazyVim From Scratch To BEAST MODE

The above video uses the LazyVim distribution. This is not to be confused with lazy.nvim which is a plugin manager for NeoVim (although LazyVim uses lazy.nvim for its plugin management!).

Other notable NeoVim distributions are:

If you want a bare-bones distribution that’s a bit more involved than the version I made above, try out kickstart.nvim.

This video from ThePrimeagen called 0 to LSP : Neovim RC From Scratch is also a good starting point but unfortunately it uses packer.nvim which is not being actively updated anymore. Although the git-repository which he makes in the video has since been updated to also use lazy.nvim as that seems to be the standard today.

This blogpost also provides a nice tutorial on how to setup several aspects of NeoVim manually without using a distribution.

Some other useful things to know about nvim that you might not just discover while learning the editor are:

lcd %:h - Local cd to folder (:h) of current file (%)
gf - goto file under cursor, the <cfile> “variable” does the same in command mode, so e.g. :e <cfile> would edit that.
:mksession!session.vim will make save the current session to the file session.vim, the ! causes overwrite if it exists
:save {file} will save the current buffer under the new name {file} and change the buffer to point to that file
More things will be added here as time passes!

Homework assignments

Debug a python program: Take one of programs that you wrote in a homework task and step trough the code with either 1); pdb, 2) pudb, 3) spyder/VsCode/other built in debugger, 4) a general DAP interface.
Inventory of tools: Write down what you generally use in terms of tooling while developing but also write a separate; list of what you would like to have, now that you have seen a sample during the lecture.
Watch / read / listen to material about your tools: Choose some material that goes trough the usage of your tools. Be it from the suggestions above or; something that you found by your self on the internet. Write down what you consumed and maybe some; of the most important points you learned and share it with the class: it might help others!
Find duplicate files: Download this python file, read it first (as you always; should!!), then run it to create a folder called “a_few_files” with different files in it.; Your task is to find out which files in this folder are duplicates, i.e. their content is the same.; You should be able to time the execution of your script externally using time find_duplicates.py.

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