Chris Rose over at offby1.net has an interesting post on tools to enhance development environments. Other than the fact that one of his recommendations is Doom Emacs, the post isn’t really Emacs-centric. Rather, he considers a series of standalone tools that can lubricate your workflow.
His suggestions are:
- Chezmoi to securely handle your configurations across multiple machines
- Doom Emacs as a comfortable, complete, and hackable Emacs configuration
- Direnv a utility to dynamically load environment variables on a current directory basis
- Starship provides fast, configurable prompts for any shell
- Asdf to manage multiple runtimes (Node.js, Ruby, Python, …) with a single tool
None of these—other than Doom Emacs, perhaps—are going to change your life but they all help reduce friction in your workflow and they all seem lightweight (again, other than Doom Emacs) so they’re a win. Rose’s post is short so you’ve nothing to lose by spending a couple of minutes with it. Perhaps one of the tools he discusses will appeal to you.