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> Environment Setup

August 19, 2019

Overview

Project Information
Before starting the challenge, I wanted to set up a positive development environment to build good coding habits. I set up the following useful tools during this time: zsh, iterm2, vim, and various keyboard shortcuts for the MacOSX.

Project Links

ITerm2

iTerm2 is a terminal emulator. It supports features such as split planes, hotkey window, built-in search, terminal shortcuts, etc., and has a lot of support for different shell integration options such as zsh.

I mainly switched to iTerm2 for easier zsh integration, and for the super awesome hotkey window for terminals everywhere.

iTerm2 Split Panes

iTerm2 Hotkey Window

Zsh

Zsh, or "Z shell" is a unix shell for the command line. Zsh goes hand-in-hand with the community-based, online platform called Oh My Zsh!, which features major extensions such as plug-ins, themes, and customization options for zsh.

Basically I switched from the default bash to iTerm2/zsh to make my terminal look prettier.

Check out my .zshrc here.

Zsh Terminal

Ascii Aquarium

Useful Links:

Vim

One skill that I have always wanted to learn, and have only had brief exposure to so far, was Vim.

I wanted to get more proficient at using Vim to navigate around the IDE more effectively, and to not have to rely on GUIs all the time. Using vim is especially useful when having to modify remote files.

To add extensions to vim, modify the .vimrc located in the home directory. I added PEP8 linters, 80 character limit rulers, relative numbering, indentation/bracketing rules, file trees, status bar themes, and other useful plugins to my vim setup.

Check out my .vimrc here.

Vim Setup

Nerdtree

Useful articles that helped me set up my .vimrc: