My workflow

A little side note

Since I work as a developer I'm stuck on MacOS because it seems to be the preferred OS for most companies. Don't get me wrong, I respect MacOS and I kinda like it, but my heart belongs to Linux.

Yes, MacOS never failed me, the hardware is great and the OS is stable as a rock, it's just that Linux is so fun to tinker with and I love the freedom it gives me.

I run Fedora on my personal laptop and it's just perfection. Since I've started using Linux (not that long ago) I tried different distros like Arch, Ubuntu, NixOS and some others but Fedora made me stay. What I miss the most and what I wasn't really able to replicate on MacOS is Sway and the ability to use a good tiling window manager. Yes I tried Yabai and I thought it was cool but somehow it didn't feel right.

And again Linux is fun. I want this word in bold because I think work should be fun, else we can't be productive 40 hours a week for the rest of our lives. Remember that word when you continue reading this post because it's the secret key to my workflow.

I use Neovim btw

This is not a surprise for anyone who knows me, I use Neovim as my main text editor.

Is it the best editor? I don't know, I don't care. Probably not actually! But sure it's a beast.

It's fast, it's lightweight, it's portable, it's hackable, it's customizable till the bone. I can be anywhere in my codebase in a matter of seconds. But most importantly it's fun as hell. The dopamine rush I get when I send all of my grep results to a quickfix list and I do find and replace is just priceless.

And AI? I have recently integrated an interesting tool in my workflow which I will talk about later.

Let's not forget about version control! I can checkout on a older commit in detached mode by pressing a few keys, if I want the history of a file it's literally <space> g h. I've got every codebase at my fingertips, it's just crazy, you need to try it to understand.

I will make a post about my Neovim setup soon, so stay tuned for that.

Now hear this. I tried them all: Atom, VSCode, Emacs, Zed, Helix (which is super cool by the way) and many others. Zed and Helix are what I would use if I had to switch from Neovim, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. I just like to be close to my code without having anything in between.

Where do I run Neovim?

I run Neovim inside a terminal of course, and that terminal for now is Alacritty. I tried many others, like Gnome Terminal, Kitty, foot, iTerm2, Konsole, Ghostty but... Alacritty never failed me and I actually like that it's not a multiplexer. I prefer to rely on a more specialized tool for that. I want to say that font rendering in Kitty is just amazing, kudos to them, but I couldn't find a way to make it fullscreen on startup, while Ghostty non-native MacOS fullscreen is buggy. Not a big deal of course but I mean, you gotta choose because of these little things today, almost every terminal emulator is good to be honest!

I customize every terminal in the same way, I use Monaco as my font and that is a recent thing, I used to read Hack for a long time. My terminal runs in fullscreen mode with an opacity of 0.95. You'll see if you care, I will share my dots later.

About the multiplexer

That's a no-brainer really, I use Zellij to enhance my terminal experience. Yeah I know about tmux of course but ehy, Zellij was a breeze to set up and recently they added a feature to avoid Neovim keybindings conflicts, so I don't have to worry about that either. I'm also aligned with it's philosophy and design so in the end I just went with it and never looked back. Alt+f and I can spawn a little floating terminal in no time, seriously I love it.

Git workflow

I'm addicted to Lazygit, I can even use it directly from within Neovim and that's just amazing. I usually don't like relying on IDE's Git wrappers, I use Lazygit even when coding with Zed. Sometimes I just use the command line for common daily operations like fetch, pull and status but for everything else I'm lazygitting. Nothing much else to say, it's just a great tool and I suggest you try it if you haven't already.

AI in my workflow

It's usually Copilot or whatever stuff my company throws at me and when it comes to agents I tried Avante, Codecompanion and Copilot chat but in the end I chose Open Code, which is same as Claude Code basically except you can use whatever model you want.

You can run it straight from your terminal, kinda like Aider and is fast enough to not make things boring.

I don't think I will ever use agents plugins for Neovim because they usually don't work well with my setup, they're built around some specific plugins like Telescope and nvim-cmp which I don't use and they come in with lot of other plugins as dependencies.

Other tools and dot files

And that's it for what matters the most. Other honorable mentions are fzf and ripgrep, bat, oh my zsh and starship. Nothing fancy really, they make my life easier and more enjoyable.

You can find my dot files on Github.