What I Use

I've explained what this site uses here.

For writing code, I find that making minor code changes is easier in vim, but I use VS Code and Zed for the most part. These are the VS Code extensions that make my life easier:

• Better Comments
• Highlight on Copy
• TODO Tree
• Trailing Spaces

This list used to be much longer, but I've come to realise that reliance on these can largely be omitted when one follows proper style guides religiously. As an example, I used to use the Bracket Peek extension a lot; however, following practices like this will surely reduce the need for such tools.

That said, I use linters often (perhaps too often?) to introduce some consistency across projects. Here are the ones I found to work best:

• ruff for Python
• shellcheck as a CLI tool for shell scripts
• Most statically typed languages come with decent linting tools built in, (e.g., gopls for Go or zig-fmt for Zig); however, for C++ though, I use cpplint

I'm a big fan of CLI tools overall, but especially those with nice TUIs. These are some that saved me a lot of time in the past:

• rich as an alternative to cat
• tmux for both multiplexing as well as to persist sessions when using ssh
• lazydocker for a better overview of running containers
• bashtop as an alternative to top

I've been looking for tools to generate flamegraphs, and flamelens looks great for this; perhaps I'll write a post about my experience with it.