Ask HN: What does your development environment look like?

It's a pretty standard Rails hipster setup on a Mac using TextMate as the editor.

I'm using a 27" Dell U2711 display.

The left hand Terminal is used for monitoring autotest (an automatic test suite runner for Ruby/Rails) and messing around with the interactive Ruby shell (IRB), git, etc.

The right hand Terminal is used for monitoring requests as they come into the development environment's web server.

The Windows XP Professional is running on VMware Fusion and used for IE testing. I use Visual Web Developer 2008 for debugging in IE.

I've got two Chrome windows, one for API documentation and one for testing, with a permanent Developer Tools window at the bottom right hand corner of the screen.

On the physical side, I use whatever 17" NEC LCD this is here, plugged into a 13" MBP. I occasionally go into the office and use another monitor, so I also use an Apple Wireless Keyboard (the aluminum one) and a Logitech laser laptop mouse.

http://i.imgur.com/UgrxJ.png

The normal workspaces on my laptop, running Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit. From left to right:

vim, Gmail/Chrome, Songbird, spare/documentation/second terminal

It's quite cramped with just one screen. I really need to get some good monitors and a solid desk.

Oh, and perhaps most importantly a pad of paper when away from home, and a glass whiteboard when at home.

Vim, vim, vim, vim, vim, vim, vim, vim, vim, logging, bacon, irb. I try to keep large methods I'm actively editing on the big windows and reference material on the smaller ones. I also arrange them physically to match the control flow--the deepest methods in the stack live to the left, and successively higher ones live to the right, up to the controller and view for MVC. I usually have an IRB session open to test new ideas, one window for running the test suite, and one to watch the logfile or run the server.

On the other monitor, usually docs, whatever I'm building, and more docs. On a single 24" display (at work), I usually fold the docs over my bacon/irb terminals. I run 6 workspaces in Openbox. Almost everything has a hotkey.

[edit]

Folks at my office know me as "that guy with all the terminals". I think part of it is that my working memory is not fantastic, and that I'm a really visual thinker. Having everything laid out in space really helps me keep track of a complex, modular system.

At home: Custom PC w/ 24" Samsung monitor + e Text Editor + Virtualbox + PuTTY + Filezilla + ExpanDrive + Navicat

http://imgur.com/9JDT3.jpg

Left monitor = coding, research notes Right monitor = testing, virtual machines All running Windows 2008 R2 Firefox with Firebug, Web Developer Toolbar, Greasemonkey, Gears, Page Saver Visual Studio 2010

On mac (we primarily do iPhone apps), Xcode, with MacVim as the external editor with keybindings setup to build/build-run, etc.

All this spanned over 2 windows monitors, 1 mac laptop and an external mac monitor, with an iPad sometimes becoming a 3rd mac monitor.

Django site. WingIDE, two terminals for runserver and test django commands respectively, and the browser (currently showing my tool for viewing and debugging data in the app).

There's a space in the top left corner because I have the left monitor in a vertical setup and the right in a horizontal.

EDIT - View from my office:

http://twitpic.com/23rg8a

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mtrencseni/4843277432/in/set-72...

http://alteredqualia.com/tmp/img/dev.png

It's more or less the same now, just the code is different.

Usually I have open at any time: SciTE, Notepad++, many browsers, Python shell, XAMPP/nginx, Gimp, Cygwin shell.

Most of times, just one window is fullscreen and I switch when needed (or just use magic hover feature from Windows 7).

Wing IDE is taking both of my screens.

    javascript:var tags=document.getElementsByTagName("a"); for (var i in tags) { if (tags[i].href.search(/jpeg|jpg|png/) !== -1) { var img = document.createElement("img"); img.src = tags[i].href;img.width = '400';tags[i].parentNode.appendChild(img); } }

Almost every hardware designer I know uses vim. I guess we're not very lispy.

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tl;dr - Basically just Emacs and Conkeror on Ubuntu. The combo of xbindkeys and devilspie help me not have to worry about the WM; apps for which it makes sense are full-screened for me. Emacs does pretty much everything for me including git, shells, IRC, and IM. The only thing I leave Emacs for is browsing via Conkeror (which feels a lot like Emacs) and the occasional photo edit in Gimp. For working on remote hosts and pairing with remote devs, tmux is a blessing.

All this on a 1.1kg Thinkpad X200s with a Kinesis Freestyle keyboard. Nexus One with Cyanogen is used as a 3G modem when I'm out and about.

I ran xmonad for a while and found I really liked the full-screen orientation, but missed being able to cut and paste from terminals easily, so now its GNOME with everything full-screen. I've re-mapped the keys in Fedora to take advantage of the command key on the mac keyboard, so I can work most of the day without touching the trackball.

2 Monitors, 26" Samsung and a 22" Asus.

Most of the time, I've got open Sublime Text for coding, Chrome for browsing, Firefox + Extensions for debugging sites, Photoshop, and a few command prompts for mercurial and django commands.

MBP screen: Skype + email

Dell 24: Browsers (testing + docs)

Dell 22 (vertical): Code (Netbeans) + terminals