yxonic / pde

Personalized Development Environment

Personalized Development Environment

Philosophy

Personalized Development Environment (PDE) is a concept borrowed from a talk given by TJ DeVries. He used the term to refer to editors (such as Vim and NeoVim) that are more than just text editors. However, I would say a good editor is just the core of a comfortable development environment, just as Linux is the core of the operating system distribution. A personalized development environment should also include the whole ecosystem.

Configuring and reproducing a PDE is hard. When I have to migrate from one computer to another, it has always been hard for me to remember all the toolings that I use, let alone restoring all the configurations I made. Instead of trying to write down every step I take, I decide to manage the process with code as much as possible.

This project maintains the instructions, toolings and configurations needed to quickly reproduce a PDE on any machine. It is just for myself and my workflow, but if you are reading this, hope you could also learn something here.

Bootstraping

macOS

On having a new machine, the first thing to do is to install a package manager. This enables easy installation for all the following utilities. For macOS, this should be Homebrew:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Afterwards, install the Helix editor, the Fish shell, the Alacritty terminal, and the Rectangle window manager:

brew install helix fish alacritty rectangle

Install all the nice utilities in the background:

brew install croc dua-cli dust eva fd fzf hexyl jless just mdbook nomino pastel pueue ripgrep sd starship tealdeer tokei zoxide

Finally, in a Fish shell, install Fisher for managing fish plugins:

curl -sL https://git.io/fisher | source && fisher install jorgebucaran/fisher

Configuration

Note that all the configurations are wrapped as a custom fish plugin within this repo. Install all of them with Fisher:

fisher install yxonic/pde

This will install:

• Custom shell functions such as proxy.
• Paths and other common variables.
• My favorite shell aliases.
• Configuration files for other tools such as hx.

Language environment

Editor

The helix editor needs some configuration to support as much languages as possible. Simply run:

hx -g fetch && hx -g build

Rust

Install rustup to manage Rust toolchain with ease:

brew install rustup

Python

Python development is best done in virtual environments. Some of my favorite virtual environment management tools are virtualfish and conda.

For python package development, I would use virtualfish with poetry. They are both installed with system python:

brew install python
pip3 install virtualfish
vf addplugins auto_activation
curl -sSL https://install.python-poetry.org | python3 -

For scientific research, I would install miniconda, since it provides many ready-to-use scientific packages and libraries.

To enable best editing experience, install following tools inside the virtual environment for helix to pick up:

pip install python-lsp-server python-lsp-black python-lsp-ruff

Node

I like to manage node versions with nvm.fish:

set -U nvm_default_version lts
set -U nvm_default_packages pnpm
fisher install jorgebucaran/nvm.fish
nvm install lts

LaTeX

To install LaTeX environment:

brew install mactex