Personal development environment
2025-09-04
My personal development environment is better than yoursI’ve come to realise that majority of people I’ve worked with don’t really care much for their personal development setup, just download vscode and jobs a goodun. But I believe people can get a much better experience if they just put a little more effort into the tools they use.
To be fair I probably spend too much time thinking about the developer tools I use, and how they work together. I get neovim isn’t for everyone but I’m going to write this posts in hopes to inspire you on revamping your own development environment. Here is a current preview of how my setup looks:
Overview of the tools I use
Here are the main elements of my setup:
* alacritty
* neovim
* tmux
* fzfI use alacritty for my terminal emulator but I’m not too precious about this, I’ve also used ghostty while on mac which I quite liked. I just think that in terms of the terminal you use make sure it isn’t the stock one, as I personal find them quite disappointing. Just to note if you are on windows using wsl I would highly recommend using the windows terminal, as I find this terminal works best on windows machines.
In terms of how I code I use neovim which I think is probably my favourite editor I’ve used to date, I’ve been using neovim and vim for the past 4 years and I don’t think I could go back. I really think everyone should try and learn vim motions and enable it in their editor of choice, for me it makes editing coding feel like a game. To be honest I struggle quite a bit now if I’m working on anything which doesn’t implement vim motions if I’m being honest.
Then to manage my coding sessions I use tmux as it is quite nice that I can have a different session per project I may be working on. My work flow is usually the first pane is for neovim and the second I use for my terminal. If I also ever need to run a server I would just create a new pane to handle this. You can see how this is setup in the screenshot of my coding environment above.
Lastly I use fzf which is my favourite part about my developer setup, as I have a script which I modified from the Primeagen. Whenever I do control f and select a project it will open a pane for neovim and a terminal. I find this is a great way to jump between projects, as at my current job I’m working on around 3 projects concurrently for features. Plus this is a lot less over head than any other way you could achieve this I find. Here is how the script looks when I press control f:
Other ways to improve you DevEx
Another thing I think is quite important to developer experiences is the keyboard you use. For me I find the HHKB a great companion while using vim as the spilt backspace and control key where caps lock is located on most keyboards is great while coding from the terminal. It does make sense considering the keyboard was designed based on UNIX layout keyboards. Since using this layout I struggle to use any other type of keyboard if I don’t remap caps lock to control. If you are curious about the layout here is a picture of my heavy grail which is an after market housing for the HHKB:
Along side this I highly recommend being comfortable at touch typing as it helps a lot with getting in the flow, as before I could touch type needing to look at my keyboard while typing every few seconds was quite distracting. I know some people come back with the argument that when they code most of the time they are thinking, but still if you are on your computer 40 plus hours a week it will benefit you in the long run learning to touch type.
Conclusion
While this article just briefly goes over my developer setup I hope it has made you want to improve your workflow. It isn’t about the tools you use it is about how comfortable you are at controlling the environment you work in. Being comfortable at using keyboard shortcuts in your editor of choice, work at improving your touch typing, and most importantly make sure you are having fun while doing so.
Thanks, Nathan.
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