The tools of an over coder last-updated 2020-10-22

The tools I use

Do tools matter? I say yeah, they do. First off, how am I supposed to code too much if I don't know what I'm coding in? Quite silly really!

So, here I will list off my day-to-day tools that I use get various things done in the realm of computers. I expect this list will change over time, and although I often vary things for fun, this should give you a good idea of what I'm about.

Editor

My editor of the day is gVim. I've toyed with Emacs, but never really got to loving it. VS Code is also really good, and I consider it my secondary editor. Depending on what I'm writing, I may choose VS Code over gVim (namely, I write Go code in VS Code because of the awesome plugin support).

Shell

My shell of the day is zsh. I use this for some of the nifty plugins, especially the ones that help search my history. Being able to type the first word of my command and hit the up arrow until I get the command I want is amazingly helpful at saving myself brain real estate.

I often also use Bash. It is ubiquitous, and is the base I write any shells scripts against. My Bash config is pretty plain, but I know how to use it and it is reliable, especially on slower systems.

Language

The language I pick for a task greatly depends on the task. Generally, my favorite language these days is Rust, but it is not the one I use the most because there are not many projects I work on that really use it's strengths (low-level programming).

So, my language of the day is not Rust, but Go. Go is versatile enough and easy enough to program that you can accomplish most tasks with a minimal of hubbub. That makes it very helpful for small tasks.

Web browser

Firefox.

I do use Chrome on occasion, when I need too, but generally I prefer to support something not sponsored by a large commercial company.

Search engine

I continue to use Google for my search engine, if only because DuckDuckGo and the ilk don't give me as good results. I'm not super worried about my digital presence, as I tend to use a lot of incognito and other such tools to mask myself.