If you’re a software engineer, one of the most important aspects of your working life is your development environment. You’ve got to be comfortable with your editor, your debuggers, your OS, your desktop, and the other important pieces of your software stack.
Evgeny Budilovsky over at Meta-x86 has an interesting post describing his environment. His post focuses on the three main legs of that environment:
- His OS;
- His Desktop;
- His editor.
Budilovsky uses Nixos because he likes the way it lets him manage his configuration and software installation. Take a look at his post for more on that.
For his desktop, he uses Xmonad, which I’ve written about before. If you haven’t already, watch the demonstration video linked from that post to see how powerful Xmonad can be. Budilovsky says he likes it because it’s configurable with Haskell in a way that reminded him of Emacs.
Emacs is, of course, his editor. He likes the way it’s configurable and can be personalized. Between Emacs and Xmonad he can largely avoid using the mouse. Not everyone likes that idea, I suppose, but I consider it a real win.
If you’re living in the Linux world, be sure to take a look at Budilovsky’s post. His setup seems very nice and may appeal to you.