I've spend the last few days tinkering with some of my software development setup and as a result feel like I settled on a combination of tools that I'm hopefully going to be happy with for a few more years.

My situation

I'm working on Mac OS often swapping between my iMac at home and the MacBook at work. My day to day includes writing services in Clojure, config files in json & yaml as well the occasional ruby and javascript.

Tools

One mayor difference in my setup is that most tools are now configured via dot files, which I store in a private github repo. This allows for versioning & sharing.

Window movement

Window movement is done via hammerspoon. I used Magnet for a while, which is a lot easier to configure, but does not allow sharing of the config via plain text file. Hammerspoon can arguably do too much, but I'm using it just for moving windows into places and that works perfectly.

Terminal

Terminal, used to be iTerm than I switched to the standard Mac Terminal but have how settled on Alacritty. It claims to be the fastest terminal, but that is not the main reason. It also happens to be configurable via yaml file in ~/.config/alacrity with auto update on change. Take note that it allows to include other files at the top of the main config. I've put all special key mapping, and each colour schema into a separate file. This allows me to switch out the colour schema by pulling in a different file in the main config file.

Editor

Editor used to be vim and MacVim, but I've now switched to NeoVim and Vimr.

Vim and MacVim were perfectly fine. From a pragmatic point of view both vim and neovim are basically equivalent. However vim focuses on stability and is reluctant to change, whilst neovim is pushing for more extensibility. The nightly build of neovim 0.5.x now includes a language server protocol (LSP) client. This means external language servers can provide accurate code semantics for navigation and refactoring. Also with floating windows NeoVim GUIs should soon be able to render a more modern look whilst keeping vim at the core of text editing.

By the way if you need absolute raw performance for gigantic files have a look at Xi Editor.

(Neo) vim plugins

After having used vim for years, I just now discovered that it allows for its config to be split into sections that get loaded based on file type or on plugin. Whilst this is not a mayor change as you can always make config changes conditional, it just makes it a lot easier to manage, and keep up to date, when its more cleanly layed out.

I'm using two mayor locations:

Configuration specific to file types. This is handy to set shiftwidth and others for python for example:

~/.config/nvim/after
└── ftplugin
    ├── bash.vim
    ├── clojure.vim
    ├── markdown.vim
    ├── python.vim
    ├── ruby.vim
    ├── rust.vim
    ├── sql.vim
    └── vimwiki.vim

Configuration for the specific plugins that I'm installing.

~/.config/nvim/plugin
└── config
    ├── golden_ratio.vim
    ├── lightline.vim
    ├── rainbow_main.vim
    ├── sunset.vim
    └── vimwiki.vim

On the topic of specific plugin changes: lightline has replaced airline. Just because its a lot easier to setup and the little arrows where not worth the trouble with Nerd fonts all the time.

fzt.vim has replaced Ctrl-P for fuzzy finding files in project, because it's much faster. It can easily be mapped to the same key combination acting as a 1:1 replacement.

For clojure I'm now using Conjure instead of fireplace. This blog post describes how to get started with Conjure for Clojure from scratch.

Finally here is a dump of my neovim config files in the form of a gist.

Summary of tools

• Window movement with Hammerspoon
  • Terminal: Alacritty
  • Editor: neovim & Vimr
  • See gist for vim pluging