Disclaimer: This will be a series of posts dedicated to document my current development setup. This setup tries to be the one of a Ninja. It won’t end up with a bunch of boring application windows typical of a bald engineer. It also won’t be a group of black terminal windows running vi as a pseudo operating system like the average geek wannabe. I’m in the search of the Ninja feeling, with white on black text editors, translucent terminals and a dose of eye candy so that I feel special without having to resort to browsing youtube with Lynx.
After many years I am finally happy with my current development setup. It fits my needs and this series of articles should serve myself as a reminder on how to setup the different pieces. However I guess that it will also be of inspiration for other developers who haven’t already found their peace of mind with their environment.
I’ll focus on Microsoft Windows systems but most of the stuff can be easily implemented in other operating systems. Actually much of the things I do for windows come standard in several operating system distributions, it’s just that I happen to like Windows (which obviously harms my geek status).
The main building blocks for this environment are the following ones:
- Cygwin – A collection of very useful Unix utilities for Windows.
- coLinux – Wonderful ‘virtualization’ software to run Linux side by side Windows.
- Debian – The only Linux distro I know a bit about. It’s fantastic so I don’t have the need to search for a better one.
- PHP5 – Currently the programming language of my choice.
- Console2 – An excellent terminal emulator with lots of eye candy.
- Firefox – The browser that came to rule them all.
- A lightweight text editor – everyone has its favorite
- A heavy IDE – Komodo and Eclipse to the rescue
- Several utilities to ease our lives – TortoiseSVN, kdiff3, wincachegrind, total commander…
Before we begin I would like to note the following:
- All tools are installed in “C:\dev”. I don’t like polluting the standard Windows installation with the development tools. Besides, it allows to easily backup most of the environment.
- I’m using a 32bit version of Windows since coLinux is not compatible with 64bit versions.
