To follow up on yesterday’s post, here are the different software packages in my laptop-based development setup:

• MacVim is my editor of choice these days. Now that I’ve switched to touch-typing mode, and given that I’ve used vi(m) for as long as I can remember, this is now growing on me every day. It’s all about muscle memory, and off-loading activities to have more spare brain cycles left for the task at hand.

  I chose MacVim over pure vim in the command line for one reason: it can be set to save all files on focus loss, i.e. when switching another app to the foreground. Tried a dark background for a while, but settled on a light one in the end. Dark backgrounds caused trouble with screen reflections when sitting with my back to a window.

• TextMate is the second editor I use, but exclusively in browse mode. It can be fired up from the command line (e.g. cd housemon && mate .) and makes it very easy to skim and search across large source collections. Having two entirely different contexts means I can keep vim and its history focused on the code I’m actually working on. I only started using this dual-editor approach a few months ago, but by now it’s become a habit to start them both up – on different areas of the screen.

• Google Chrome is my main development web browser. I settled on it (over Safari) for mostly one reason: it supports having the developer console pane open to the side of the main screen. There are plenty of dev tools included, from browsing the DOM structure to various performance graphs. Using a dedicated browser for development lets me flush the cache and muck with settings without disrupting other web activities.

• Safari is my secondary browser. This is the one which keeps history, knows how to log into sites, and ends up having lots of tabs and windows open to keep track of all the distractions on the web. Reference docs, searching for information, and all the other time sinks the web has to offer. It drops nicely to the background when I want to get back to the real thing, but it’s there alongside MacVim whenever I need it.

• iTerm 2 is what I use as command line. The only reason I’m using this instead of the built-in Terminal application, is that it supports split panes (I don’t use screen or tmux much). It’s set up to start up with two windows side-by-side, because tabs are not always convenient: sometimes you really need to see a few things at the same time.

  I do use tabs in all these apps, dragging them around between windows when needed. Sometimes, I’ll open a new iTerm window and make it much larger (all from the keyboard), to see all the output of a ps or grep command, for example.

• nvAlt is a fork of Notational Velocity – a note-taking app which stores each note as a plain text file. Its main feature is that it starts up and searches everything instantly. Really. In the blink of an eye, I can find all the notes I wrote about anything. I use it for logging how I installed some tricky software and for lots and lots of lists with design ideas. Plain text. Instant. Clickable URLs. Shared through Dropbox. Perfect.

There’s a lot more to it, but these are the six tools I now use day in day out for software development. Even for embedded work, I’ll use the Arduino IDE only as compile + upload step, editing code in MacVim nowadays – because it has so much more functionality.

All of the above are either included in Mac OSX or open source software. I’m inclined to use OSS as a way to keep my learning investments safe. If ever one of these tools ends up going nowhere, or in an unwanted direction, then chances are that some developer(s) will fork the project to keep things on track (as has already happened with TextMate, iTerm, and nvAlt). In the long term, these core tools are simply too important…