Sameer KumarFollowBetter Programming--ListenShareHee-haw… Here we go. I have been coding for almost a decade now. And, for anyone who spends two-thirds of his day doing so, his toolchain matters. Let’s go for a walk down the memory lane. This article is going to be different.Disclaimer: Today’s content is going to be subjective, so, please read with an open mind.I was dabbling in Notepad++ to learn Java development as a young, clueless potato. At that moment, I didn’t even understand what an editor was. To me, it seemed like a Notepad with extra buttons.The focus was on learning programming, not DX (Development Experience). The only intriguing thing was that I could run Code using a plugin by pressing one of the function keys. It gave me a big advantage over writing in Notepad and running Windows command prompt.I could decently code in a couple of languages now. One of the books I was reading recommended the next shiny thing, Eclipse. Eclipse had hit quite the right spot. For the first time, the toolchain was becoming addictive. The joy of coding, building, and running those Java Swing apps without diving into the build and execution system was simply… muahhh.Internet was not big, so I often would go through offline docs and figure my way out. It got tedious at times, but there wasn’t another way out. For the first time, I wondered why this software didn’t behave like the previous one. No, I didn’t know the word IDE yet. I only knew that Java runs on three billion devices, and I had to be good at it.I got this new blue laptop. The sticker says, “Ubuntu.” What the heck is this thing? Where is my DVD with pirated Windows and activation key written on the back of it? Went to the school library, and boy, that book on Unix gave me tremors of joy. I decided to shift to Linux permanently (and I never touched Windows ever since).I couldn’t understand why weirdos on the internet always suggest editing random config files using something called VI. Who on god’s green earth would open a terminal, navigate to a file, and enter into that creepy vi thing from where one can’t even quit?Sadly, it was a part of the college curriculum, and I had to write in it. The good thing is that after you press ‘i’, vi becomes “normal.” I hated it so bad that I wrote a gedit config, so my professor thought I was coding in the terminal.Now, things were taking shape. I had decided my career path as a web developer. I often built small utility apps. Again, the book I was referring to told me that the Sublime is the next shiny thing. Ahoi! I was on board.There is something about it that feels close to my heart. It was JSON configuration, and I spent the whole week tweaking things in the settings file. It was a near-magical experience to copy a JSON file on a USB drive and make my friend’s machine like mine. Lowkey dotfiles, hehehe.At that point, my Sublime started to look like a different application to regular Sublime users. To this day, I am a hardcore ricing fan (a fancy term for customizing your software). And yes, I am immune to that pop-up asking me to buy Sublime, just like good old Winrar.I felt like I was getting ancient and even started working professionally. Sublime text was like the back of my hand now. Every keybinding and config option lived in my mind. Not to mention the plethora of extensions, well customized for my workflow.At that point, losing my Sublime config folder was more of a worry than the laptop itself. Just kidding, I knew git by then. The office was asking to work in VS Code, so again, there were no options. Spent a month tweaking it.In the end, I wondered what a Frankenstein’s monster I had made. It looked like Sublime, responded like Sublime married to VS Code, and started heavy like my old friend, Eclipse. The worst part was that the senior guy scolded me every time he tried debugging on my machine. Usual hacker problems, no big deal.One thing I love about VS Code is its zero-config extension ecosystem. And it overall felt smart under the hood while coding. I could feel that it had something that Sublime lacked. To this day, VS Code has been my favorite coding software. If something can be coded, it will eventually be in VS Code. I feel it is like the modern version of emacs.I felt the difference between strict and dynamically typed language firsthand. I worked on Ruby on Rails those days and dynamically typed languages are a nightmare for any editor. Shoot me, but I hate Ruby, Python, JavaScript, etc., even though I code in them daily for one reason. Maybe for that one reason, I knock on the doors of JetBrains from time to time.What’s this OCD-looking thing, you ask? It’s a condition where you are a bit too strict about how things should be. You may say, wow, that’s a good thing, but then if your table’s edges don’t match your laptop’s, you get a shiver of anxiety.Also, I get distracted fast, so I need a focused environment. I left this article to get the above image, and now I am back after reading about the movie this meme came from. OK, cool, we are on the same page now. See, we aren’t much different after all!I like both environments, outside and inside the laptop, to be ultra-mimal. Check out the screenshots at the bottom of this page; they aren’t even close icons on application windows, if possible. From letter spacing in fonts to the inner padding of a popup, everything is a trigger. To be honest, it makes me happy to do this kind of stuff, and if you search for “Unix ricing,” you’ll get blown away.On the other hand, literally on the other hand, I started getting wrist pain due to constant jumping from letters and arrows. Grinding 80 hours a week comes with its own perks. 😅I was googling about this wrist pain condition, and funnily enough, one of the tips was to use Vim (-mode) on your computer. That sneaky VI, I couldn’t even understand was the same thing until I opened it. I had some residual hate towards it.For server work, I was using Nano. Later, I moved to micro, which was closer to VS Code bindings. Every stunt it takes to avoid my arch nemesis, Vi. I realised that literally every tool I use has that weird Sublime and VS Code hybrid keybindings.Gosh! I hate myself. Can’t even use another person’s computer running a pure version of that software. To support the no terminal mindset, over the years, I forgot all my appreciation for awk, sed, grep, etc. Things needed to change; I couldn’t live in this denial.I resolved to use Vim. Not because it’s any better for my specific workflow but because I wanted to break my dependency on VS Code.I knew I couldn’t drop into Vim for my day job. So, I settled on the middle ground of using Vim bindings in VS Code. Courtesy to a YouTuber called Ben Awad, who showed this peaceful path of adopting Vim. I always wondered how he could magically teleport to random places when I could only move there really fast.On the safe side, I’d automatically turn it off in all my office project folders. Nothing in Vim particularly amazed me then because I had a similar shortcut in mind for VS Code. Yet, the constant tussle between both was getting hard. By the end of the year, I could fluently navigate in VS Code using Vim keybindings. After almost a year of usage, I started seeing the ergonomic and functional benefits.It was darn stupid of me to think that one day I’d uninstall VS Code and move to Vim someday because I could navigate there similarly. I didn’t realize I was using Vim bindings for doing VS Code things; the workflow part was still a miss. All that I learned was a few keyboard shortcuts.I moved anyway. One day I had to find and replace a few words in a project. I couldn’t do it, so welcome back home. VS Code, at this point, had become my identity. I could fly through code blazingly fast in VS Code, and my friends knew me for that. So I settled back in, leaving Vim.I was happy I could do whatever those Vim nerds could do, yet I knew I was still in a big comfort zone bias. My problem was that I was using VS Code with a hybrid keybinding, and now I replaced even that with something else. What kind of a solution was that?Luckily, I got a break from office project work sometime back, and I knew this was the chance to transition my configs. I realized I had no trouble in moving from Sublime to VS Code; it was a happy process. I started working in raw Neovim, and yeah, it was painful, but I had a plan. Whenever I missed something, I would “read Neovim docs” and add it.Makes me happy I understand and have written every single line of my editor config myself. Took two months but now I have my own sweet little PDE (Personal Development Environment).This covered everything from default indentation size to a file tree to language servers. Earlier, I watched a YouTube video from ThePrimeagen on Neovim setup, and it overwhelmed me so badly that I had to take a week’s break from thinking about my own configuration. 😂Now that I have fully moved my workflow to Neovim, it doesn’t even feel any different. I was already used to Vim bindings, only the aesthetics have changed. Yet the good part is I understand how these moving pieces work. I understand how that in-line error message shows, from where these fancy auto-completions come, how each line gets formatted, and much more. Looking back, I could have peeped into the source code of VS Code or its extensions, but the mindset was to use it and not learn it.The biggest shift is that I look at software in general from the mentality of the builder rather than a consumer. Now, when I see something, I ponder how to build it rather than use it.After all, I am an engineer and my identity revolves around two main things: how well I understand softwares and what I (can) buildUnfortunately, I can’t go through every screen and utility, but if you like the setup, I can write an article on how everything is set up from scratch. A detailed tutorial of sorts on the basics of terminal and Vim customization. Do drop a comment if you’d like me to.----Better ProgrammingWorking as Technical Consultant at Tarka Labs, India. I love Coding, Travelling and Teaching. 😇Sameer KumarinBetter Programming--2Benoit RuizinBetter Programming--200VinitainBetter Programming--32Sameer KumarinBetter Programming--13Moses Musinde--2Ricardo GerardiinThe Pragmatic Programmers--inasarhaye--Matt BentleyinLevel Up Coding--3FonderElite--Staney Joseph--HelpStatusWritersBlogCareersPrivacyTermsAboutText to speechTeams