I have started working on a couple of new projects that have been stagnating on the back burner of my brain for the past couple of months, but I finally have the time to work on them.

While at it, I noticed how I’ve accumulated bloat in my development setup over the five years since I picked up my current laptop.

Visual Studio Code, my go-to IDE for most of these five years, had extensions I haven’t touched since I installed it on a whim. On the other hand, my previous attempt at recovering from the bloat in the form of a .vimrc was functional but failed to serve me the comforts of an IDE.

I had to change things.

So, I spent the last three days starting from scratch. I’m more opinionated now than five years ago about how my development environment should look and feel. I have ideas on what makes me productive, and I configured my setup to facilitate just that.

This time around, I also documented everything I installed and every change I made. I will probably make it public here soon. But to give you a gist, the setup revolves around iTerm2, tmux, and tmuxinator to automatically spin up specific terminal windows, and Neovim with a handful of plugins and LSPs configured to be my IDE.

Neovim feels much better than Vim off the bat and could reasonably compete with modern IDEs.

All this would be futile if I didn’t end up coding. December is a busy month, and I plan to squeeze in tiny sprints of work between my other obligations.