Have you asked yourself what do you really need? Without the noise, without the hassle.
Here's
My software development setup for this 2024
and some extras!
!important; The links of this post contain NO referral links and I've got zero monies to create this list. Everything you're about to read is my experience and opinion, enjoy! 😊
BYE BYE VSCode. Hello VSCodium!
Straight to the point; Why would I want to send telemetry and tracking data to Microsoft all the time?
VSCodium contains the community-driven Open Source, freely-licensed binaries of VSCode with a beautiful icon that suits my desktop better! 😁
Code Companion AI Autocompletion
Apparently, Github Copilot requires Microsoft's distributed version of VSCode (wondering why 😇) and that led me to seek alternatives, now I'm glad I did!
Here's Codeium, which has a FREE individual plan, and has proven more useful to me than copilot, honestly.
The context awareness amongst the project is quite superior and I'm now using the paid version instead the Copilot paid one.
I assume they might train the model further if you use the free version but didn't read the Terms & Conditions. It was sunday morning. I apologize. Shall you do please tell me 🙃
VSCodium plugins
Less is more.
VSCode/VSCodium has improved on every update, linkedEditing settings drove "Auto rename tag" extension obsolete, "bracket pair colorizer" is now the default behaviour in VSCodium, so it's yet another extension that you no longer need and so on and so forth.
On the other hand certain extensions like Codeium made others obsolete, like anything related to "code snippets".
Now here's the full list of extensions I really use:
- Codeium explained before
- Better comments it adds visual and mental order for me 😂
- GitLens the Good Ol' Git Lens, if you didn't tested it yet, give it a shot!
-
Material Icon Theme Having the proper icon for each thingy, is it too much to ask? This icon theme solves that for you. It even helps by adding easy to grasp icons for common directories like
core,utils,distand much more! - Prettier Undoubtedly one of the most beloved extensions, specially when you enable "formatOnSave" along prettier as default formatter.
- Markdown Preview Github Styling which name is self-explanatory I guess. A nice to have one, not the only one, though. I've used others during the time, don't have a favourite as for now, it just happens that I'm using this one at the moment.
And that's been the entire plugins list I'm afraid.
It's not that I've suddenly become lazy and don't want to write any more I promise, this is really the extensions I'm using right now.
In certain projects I can have the Python extensions as well, maybe Language Support for Java or any other language I might be fiddling around with. Maybe some test-related extension if it's any good (Playwright, Jest...) depending on the needs of what I'm doing!!
Tip:
Remember that you can create profiles in VSCodium > Settings > Profiles, each with its very own set of extensions, this way you don't need to manually disable the heavy language/platform specific extensions when you work in other kind of projects, avoiding weird behaviours and/or crashes!
Browser
Who would have told me that we would be talking about browsers in 2024?
- Isn't Chrome the king? -Despite tracking the soul out of you-
- Isn't Safari so shitty that's considered the new IE?
- Isn't Firefox so RAM consuming that's better to just leave it to the QA team?
- Isn't Opera / Opera GX buggy and crashy?
- Isn't Brave dead after they added third party ads, trackers and crypto scams (the exact oposite of their selling point)?
- Is Epiphany something more than a medium to install Chromium in certain Linux distributions?
Aren't you tired of browsers that look the same, do almost the same, each one with it's flaws? SO DID I.
I recently discovered Arc which I've read that "it's not a browser" somewhere even though is developed and published by "The Browser Company" 😂
I'm not yet using all the features (I'm getting old, bear with me), here's what I love the most as for now:
- It has "Spaces" to keep your contexts separated (e.g. job space, personal space...).
- You can create folders in each space as well, which allows me to store tabs per project.
- Contextual AI; honestly didn't used it that much because I'm used to the old fashioned way, but I'm slowly getting there!
- Little Arc. Being Arc the default browser, when you open a link from Meet/Teams/Discord, your email or any other source external to Arc, it opens it inside a "little Arc" which you can simply close when you're done (e.g. SSO login pop-up) or hit the maximise button to add it to your "Big Arc"!
- Two tabs at the same time! I'm currently using the split view feature, here have a look:
You can also drag the separator to make one side or the other larger or set up the tabs vertically instead (useful when using my secondary monitor which I've rotated 90 degrees).
Being used to other browsers it was a clunky experience the first day, not gonna lie, but an amazing one after a couple of days more, so much so that that's now my main browser!
Who asked for more AI?
I've been testing Faraday with a couple or three of different Mistral-based models, just as GPT-like helper.
If you're interested in task-specific models such improvisation, role play, long conversations and so on you can also find a ton of them in the "Manage Models" menu, so you can download and then link the one you want to test to existing or new "AI Characters".
MORE AI? REALLY?
The previous one was for funzies, just to fiddle around but this one... oh boy, this one's a MUST!
WARP Terminal allows for seamless copy paste, it remembers previous commands and suggest them to you while you type and many more goodies
You won't regret checking the "Reusable Workflows" feature!
THE END
Share your favourite tools in the comment section! 👇🏻😁👇🏻
Top comments (26)
«Maccy» to have dozens of items in my clipboard
Raycast does this aswell - with tons of other cool features!
Will check this one as well, thanks you for sharing! 😁
It actually looks amazing! I'll give it a shot, thanks for sharing! 😁
I don’t know what makes Google Chrome a “king”. I haven’t seen neither unique features, nor good performance. In my experience, Firefox is much snappier. And I’m not even talking about its customizability, if you’re willing to put in some time you can make it as private or spyware-ish as you want.
Well... this 😅
If privacy is your main focus one could tweak a firefox to the extent you consider necessary as you well said, you might as well use Tor which is a privacy-enhancing, if you will, browser based on Firefox, or you could do exactly the same with Chromium!
Though the selling point that got me was not "Arc is the browser that's most focused on privacy" (we lost that war long ago, let's be honest 😅) but "they re-thought something we all use -web browsers- and designed on a different way" which I feel refreshing after using it for some weeks. I now need some features such the split view so there's no way back...
“This” is simply a result of Google’s monopoly, I haven’t seen any good reasons to use their browser (when I need Chromium-based browser for testing browsers, I use ungoogled chromium).
Tor is not a silver bullet. Without knowing what you’re doing, you can shoot yourself in the foot with it.
“We lost that war long ago”? Whatever floats your boat, I guess, but it’s not true. At the very least, getting a web browser that is not spyware, is reasonably simple. Mitigating malicious websites is a different story, though.
100% agree on the Tor topic!
On the other hand, Chrome is also the most used among Mac and Windows users, in which you have Safari and Edge pre-installed respectively (and the OSs are quite annoying trying to re-rail you to their browsers 😂).
The users are the ones that consciously download, install and use Google Chrome, and painstakingly confirm that they prefer Chrome as default browser to their respective OSs every now and then.
Wether Chrome it is a "better" or "worse" browser is a totally different topic, probably the least important if you ask me, because market share depends on marketing and marketing is always a matter of perception, not product.
We, as "power users" can choose from a different point of view but for the majority of the population will use whatever they "perceive" as good. Once they've made their minds you won't probably change them, either.
Lastly I completely agree with you on that having a browser that's not spyware on its own is a huge point for privacy and is a first step to protect yourself.
PD: Shall you write a post about "ungoogled chromium" and other alternatives please mention me or let me know somehow! I'll probably learn something new 😄
I tried out Warp and the first thing I saw was a prompt to sign up for an account. I have never seen this for any terminal. I will stick to iTerm2.
I don't really know what they do with the email either; I just assume that everyone that asks for data is selling it so I just use the spam email address and call it a day 😅 I use the same address to answer spam/scam emails as a hobby so they waste time with me instead of dealing with a potential victim so I won't loose any valuable email either 😂
Now let's be honest, If it was me dedicating time and effort to a piece of software I would also ask for an email at least! As a fellow developer I understand that we need money to buy coffee ☕ and vitamin supplements to fuel the innovation. 🙃
On the other hand, If you don't test it, how would you know if it's any good or not? Do it for science! 😂
Great article wish a dash of humor. Codeium looks promising and I will be testing it next week
Thanks for your comment! Looking forward to seeing your findings! 😁
So far I was normally coding and in some cases it suggested some boilerplate that I used. It is helpful, but not as much as I expected. Still, I will keep using it to reduce writing boilerplate and will dive deeper on how to improve my coding efficiency
Yup, that's the main reason I'm using these.
It sometimes predicts the next function I'll code by learning what I've done before (I guess) so it gets more useful. You can also add a comment in the code of what do you want to do and it'll help you on that, though copilot seems slightly better at this specifically idk, need to test it more.
You are right, it predicts what you want to write based on what you have written so far. Over time it keeps getting better at suggesting what you want to write.
Laughed out loud with the browser section 😂😂😂
Been using VSCodium for some months, I'll try Codeium now, thanks! ❤️
Thanks to you for reading! 😁
I love it 🤣
I tested vscoduim, it was good until I missed finding some extensions
The impression is that we will all love Codeium
Thank you for sharing 🤜🏽🤛🏽
Yes! The extensions that aren't available are the Microsoft ones, the rest should allegedly be there 😁
Thanks you for your comment! 😀
Great setup and love the humor in it too 😂
Thanks for your comment! 😁
Everything are very interesting. But the fact that we have almost lost the battle for privacy is the most accurate of all.
Well I didn't say "almost", ask your government's intelligence services that monitor the Internet traffic, which -totally by chance- happen to be the ones that own most of the Tor network nodes in that territory to increase the chances for them to be the output node (and all that with your money 🙃)
Certain things like point-to-point encryption are nice to bring privacy but we don't have that in most "things" we do across the Internet, have we
No doubt all the mentioned tech/software a
are awesome 😎.
But for AI, have you tried Pieces For Developers.
I have tried VSCodium for a while then I realised cannot use Remote Window. Does anyone have the same problem as me?
This might be one of the limits, as that could be a Microsoft VS Code specific extension :(