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Dev'ing on Linux is Fun!

Sometimes necessity gives you an excuse to learn some new fun stuff.

🍿 2 min. read

I love playing with my dotfiles. No, really, I could have played video games before bed but here I am up late again customizing my tooling stack. It's a weird passion I have. I blame my former mentor Toran Billups, but I digress.

Why Linux?

In the past six years I've bounced between being a web app developer on Windows and MacOS. It should go without saying that Windows has given me numerous struggles, especially in an enterprise software environment.

Recently we hit a wall. Ember would take over ten minutes to build and the more complicated apps were closer to twenty-five minutes. I've been not only throwing away countless development hours watching slow builds and build failures, but worse yet it's been causing burnout.

So we flipped the desk. I chose Linux over MacOS because, well, I'd hoped it would be fun and different... it has been!

The Result

Dracula themed terminal prompt

Put simply, I'm finally able to use the tools that even on MacOS didn't run well. I was able to refer back to my previous articles on writing dotfiles while making adjustments for the platform, the fact that it's 2018, and to change things up just a little. I find it beautiful and familiar.

Terminal — Hyper

I push my terminal a little, but not too hard. As a visual person doing web development, Hyper is perfect for me.

It feels lightning quick on my linux box and is simply gorgeous with dracula theme applied. I followed their "Install using config file" instructions while manually git cloning the repo for Hyper to find. The configuration is a .js file which is bonus points for me.

Shell — Fish

Previously I recommended using Zsh with a bunch of customizations. Now, I just install Fish which is configured nicely right out of the box.

An unofficial dracula theme is available as well! I kept the prompt it comes with too which is nice.

NeoVim and Tmux

Overall I'm still rocking the same NeoVim setup and Tmux setup I've recommended in the past. Some personal minor adjustments like number relativenumber which is a new favorite vim config of mine, and I'm pretty satisfied with it.

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