On programming workflows

For the last month, I had technical talks with plenty of programmers from all around the globe – thank you IRC! Something interesting that often showed up in the discussion was the actual workflow we have when writing code. Some people are use to IDE and won’t change their tools for anything else. Some others use very basic text editors (I even know someone using BBEdit for his job work! crazy, isn’t it?). I think it’s always a good thing to discuss that kind of topic, because it might give you more hindsight on your own workflow, improve it, share it or just show your nice color scheme.

I’ll be talking about:

My editor

I’ve tried a lot of editors in the last ten years. I spent a year using emacs but eventually discovered – erm, learned! – vim and completely fell in love with the modal editor. It was something like a bit less than ten years ago. I then tried a lot of other editors (because of curiosity) but failed to find something that would help be better than vim to write code. I don’t want to start an editor war; here’s just my very personal point of view on editing. The concept of modes in vim enables me to use a very few keystrokes to perform what I want to do (moving, commands, etc.) and I feel very productive that way.

A year ago, a friend advised me to switch to neovim, which I have. My editor of the time is then neovim, but it’s so close to vim that I tend to use (neo)vim. :)

I don’t use any other editing tool. I even use neovim for taking notes while in a meeting or when I need to format something in Markdown. I just use it everywhere.

My neovim setup

I use several plugins:

Plugin 'VundleVim/Vundle.vim'
Plugin 'ctrlpvim/ctrlp.vim'
Plugin 'gruvbox'
Plugin 'neovimhaskell/haskell-vim'
Plugin 'itchyny/lightline.vim'
Plugin 'rust-lang/rust.vim'
Plugin 'jacoborus/tender.vim'
Plugin 'airblade/vim-gitgutter'
Plugin 'tikhomirov/vim-glsl'
Plugin 'plasticboy/vim-markdown'
Plugin 'cespare/vim-toml'
Plugin 'mzlogin/vim-markdown-toc'
Plugin 'ElmCast/elm-vim'
Plugin 'raichoo/purescript-vim'
Plugin 'easymotion'
Plugin 'scrooloose/nerdtree'
Plugin 'ryanoasis/vim-devicons'
Plugin 'tiagofumo/vim-nerdtree-syntax-highlight'
Plugin 'mhinz/vim-startify'
Plugin 'Xuyuanp/nerdtree-git-plugin'
Plugin 'tpope/vim-fugitive'
Plugin 'MattesGroeger/vim-bookmarks'
Plugin 'luochen1990/rainbow'

Vundle

A package manager. It just takes the list you read above and clones / keeps updated the git repositories of the given vim packages. It’s a must have. There’re alternatives like Pathogen but Vundle is very simple to setup and you don’t have to care about the file system: it cares for you.

ctrlp

This is one is a must-have. It gives you a fuzzy search buffer that traverse files, MRU, tags, bookmarks, etc.

I mapped the file search to the , f keys combination and the tag fuzzy search to , t.

gruvbox

The colorscheme I use. I don’t put an image here since you can find several examples online.

This colorscheme also exists for a lot of other applications, among terminals and window managers.

haskell-vim

Because I write a lot of Haskell, I need that plugin for language hilighting and linters… mostly.

lightline

The Lightline vim statusline. A popular alternative is Powerline for instance. I like Lightline because it’s lightweight and has everything I want.

rust.vim

Same as for Haskell: I wrote a lot of Rust code so I need the language support in vim.

tender

A colorscheme for statusline.

vim-gitgutter

I highly recommend this one. It gives you diff as icons in the symbols list (behind the line numbers).

vim-glsl

GLSL support in vim.

vim-markdown

Markdown support in vim.

vim-toml

TOML support in vim.

TOML is used in Cargo.toml, the configuration file for Rust projects.

vim-markdown-toc

You’re gonna love this one. It enables you to insert a table of contents wherever you want in a Markdown document. As soon as you save the buffer, the plugin will automatically refresh the TOC for you, keeping it up-to-date. A must have if you want table of contents in your specifications or RFC documents.

elm-vim

Elm support in vim.

purescript-vim

Purescript support in vim.

easymotion

A must have. As soon as you hit the corresponding keys, it will replace all words in your visible buffer by a set of letters (typically one or two), enabling you to just press the associated characters to jump to that word. This is the vim motion on steroids.

nerdtree

A file browser that appears at the left part of the current buffer you’re in. I use it to discover files in a file tree I don’t know – I use it very often at work when I work on a legacy project, for instance.

vim-devicons

A neat package that adds icons to vim and several plugins (nerdtree, ctrlp, etc.). It’s not a must-have but I find it gorgeous so… just install it! :)

vim-nerdtree-syntax-highlight

Add more formats and files support to nerdtree.

vim-startify

A cute plugin that will turn the start page of vim into a MRU page, enabling you to jump to the given file by just pressing its associated number.

It also features a cow that gives you fortune catchphrases. Me gusta.

nerdtree-git-plugin

Git support in nerdtree, it adds markers in front of file that have changes, diff, that were added, etc.

vim-fugitive

A good Git integration package to vim. I use it mostly for its Gdiff diff tooling directly in vim, even though I like using the command line directly for that. The best feature of that plugin is the integrated blaming function, giving you the author of each line directly in a read-only vim buffer.

vim-bookmarks

Marks on steroids.

rainbow

This little plugins is very neats as it allows me to add colors to matching symbols so that I can easily see where I am.

Workflow in Rust

I’m a rustacean. I do a lot of Rust on my spare time. My typical workflow is the following:

1. I edit code in neovim
2. Depending on the project (whether I have a robust unit tests base or not or whether I’m writing a library or an app), I use several cargo commands:

• for a library project, I split my screen in two and have a cargo watch -x test running; this command is a file watcher that will run all the tests suites in the project as soon as a file changes;
• for an app project, I split my screen in two and have a cargo watch – similar to cargo watch -x check running; this command is a file watcher that will proceed through the compilation of the binary but it will not compile it down to an actual binary; it’s just a check, it doesn’t produce anything you can run. You can manually run that command with cargo check. See more here;
• for other use cases, I tend to run cargo check by hand and run cargo build to test the actualy binary

3. Because I’m a unix lover, I couldn’t work correctly without a terminal, so I use neovim in a terminal and switch from the console to the editor with the keybinding C-z and the jobs and fg commands. I do that especially to create directories, issue git commands, deploy things, etc. It’s especially ultra cool to run a rg search or even a find / fd. I sometimes do that directly in a neovim buffer – with the :r! command – when I know I need to edit things from the results. Bonus: refactoring with tr, sed and find -exec is ultra neat.

Workflow in Haskell

The workflow is almost exactly the same besides the fact I use the stack build --fast --file-watch command to have a file watcher.

Haskell’s stack doesn’t currently the awesome check command Rust’s cargo has. Duh :(

I also have a similar workflow for other languages I work in, like Elm, even though I use standard unix tools for the file watching process.

Git workflow

Aaaah… git. What could I do without it? Pretty much nothing. git is such an important piece of software and brings such an important project philosophy and behaviors to adopt.

What I find very cool in git – besides the tool itself – is everything around it. For instance, on GitHub, you have the concept of Pull Request (PR) – Merge Request in GitLab (MR). Associated with a good set of options, like disallowing people to push on the master branch, hooks, forcing people to address any comments on their MR, this allows for better code reviews and overall a way better quality assurance of the produced code than you could have without using all this infrastructure. Add a good set of DevOps for deployment and production relatide issues and you have a working team that has no excuse to produce bad code!

Some git candies I love working with

My neovim fugitive plugin allows me to open a special buffer with the :Gblame command that gives me a git blame annotation of the file. This might be trivial but it’s very useful, especially at work when I have my colleagues next me – it’s always better to directly ask them about something than guessing.

Another one that I love is :Gdiff, that gives you a git diff of the modification you’re about to stage. I often directly to a git diff in my terminal, but I also like how this plugin nails it as well. Very pratictal!

General note on workflow

It’s always funny to actually witness difference in workflows, especially at work. People who use mostly IDEs are completely overwhelmed by my workflow. I was completely astonished at work that some people hadn’t even heard of sed before – they even made a Google search! I’m a supporter of the philosophy that one should use the tool they feel comfortable with and that there’s no “ultimate” tool for everyone. However, for my very own person, I really can’t stand IDEs, with all the buttons and required clicks you have to perform all over the screen. I really think it’s a waste of time, while using a modal editor like neovim with a bépo keyboard layout (French dvorak) and going back and forth to the terminal is just incredibly simple, yet powerful.

I had a pretty good experience with Atom, a modern editor. But when I’ve been told it’s written with web technologies, the fact it’s slow as fck as soon as you start having your own tooling (extensions), its pretty bad behavior and incomprensible “Hey, I do whatever the fck I want and I’ll just reset your precious keybindings!” or all the weird bugs – some of my extensions won’t just work if I have an empty pane open, wtf?!… well, I was completely bolstered that GUI interfaces, at least for coding and being productive, are cleary not for me. With my current setup, my hands never move from the keyboard – my thrists are completely static. With all the candies like easymotion, ctrlp, etc. etc. I just can’t find any other setups faster and comfier than this one.

There’s even an extra bonus to my setup: because I use mostly unix tools and neovim, it’s pretty straigth-forward to remote-edit something via ssh, because everything happens in a terminal. That’s not something you can do easily with Atom, Sublime Text or any other editors / IDEs – and you even pay for that shit! No offence!

However, there’s a caveat: because pretty much everything I do is linked to my terminal, the user experience mostly relies on the performance of the terminal. Using a bad terminal will result in an overall pretty bad experience, should it be editing, compiling, git or ssh. That’s why I keep lurking at new terminal emulaters – alacritty seems very promising, yet it’s still too buggy and lacks too many features to be production-ready to me – but it’s written in Rust and is GPU-accelerated, hells yeah!

Conclusion

Whoever you are, whatever you do, whomever you work with, I think the most important thing about workflow is to find the one that fits your needs the most. I have a profound, deep digust for proprietary and closed software like Sublime Text and IDEs that use GUIs while keyboard shortcut are just better. To me, the problem is about the learning curve and actually wanting to pass it – because yes, learning (neo)vim in details and mastering all its nits is not something you’ll do in two weeks; it might take months or years, but it’s worth it. However, as I said, if you just feel good with your IDE, I will not try to convert you to a modal editor or a unix-based workflow… because you wouldn’t be as productive as you already are.

Keep the vibe!