A Development Workflow

From my first programming steps, I used a bunch of different IDEs to code, depending on the times and the programming language used: Borland C++, Code::Blocks (for C), Visual Studio (C, C++), Matlab IDE, IDLE (Python native IDE), Eclipse (With PyDev for Python), Spyder, Sublime Text, Vim, VS Code, etc.

This is somehow chronological. I lately used VS Code because of three main reasons: This is a great software from Microsoft, I needed to work on Windows (unfortunately) and wanted something great for switching between languages.

Since I recentely came back to MacOS / Linux, I felt the need to restore my “old school” development workflow, with vim and tmux. This is what this note is about.

Terminals

• iTerm2 on MacOS.
• Terminator on Linux

Vim

A couple of years now I have been using Vim. I still feel as a newbie considering the wide options it offers, but also feel productive with it. I use it in the shell, but also with Sublime Text and VS Code thanks to the plugins.

Vim in the shell with some configuration and plugins is a killer tool for developping in any language.

Here is my vim configuration file (.vimrc). Here is what is worth mentionning:

• I use vundle as vim package manager. Installing a plugin is simple: :PluginInstall, after adding Plugin "<name>" in .vimrc.
• My leader key is \
• Plugins:
  • Nerdtree (left buffer of the screenshot above)
  • nerdtree-git-plugin: A plugin of NERDTree showing git status flags.
  • VimDevIcons. This plugin is to have file icons showing up in the menu (like VSCode). It requires having a patched font (I am using Fira Code with ligatures enabled as standard font, and Hack Nerd Font as Non-ASCII font). Those needs be be configured in the terminal (iTerm2 in my case). They are installed with the following commands on Mac: brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts brew cask install font-fira-code brew cask install font-hack-nerd-font
  • colorschemes (I usually use molokai).
  • Vim airline with airline-themes for status/tabline.
  • ale for async linting.
  • YouCompleteMe for autocompletion.
  • Vim Fugitive as Git wrapper.
  • fzf as main fuzzy file finder.
• A few key binding:
  • jj as second ESC.
  • TAB with . (repeat)
  • CTRL+N to toggle nerdtree
  • leader + f to trigger fzf for fuzzy finding (:Files).
  • leader + q to trigger fzf with git filtering (:GFiles).