My take on Personalized Development Environment

Before I start writing some posts on my journey on creating my personalized development environment, I thought it would be necessary to introduce the topic and what is my take on it so I can later point in to the different aspects on it on the following blog posts.

What is a Personalized development Environment?

Personalized Development Environment (PDEs for short, do not confuse them with partial differential equations!) is a new take on development environments based on the idea that assembling and personalize the coding experience is a main component on the experience of, basically, writing code.

This idea was first proposed by TJ DeVries, Neovim core maintainer, on a long form video where he challenges the traditional text editor vs IDE dichotomy. He argues that PDEs live in an "in between" space, since they are neither a strip down text editor or a fully fledged IDE, as the user may add or remove functionality depending on the experience they seek.

In order to consider something a PDE, we have some requirements:

• Must have some level of assembly, i.e. some level of personalization, otherwise its not "personal"
• Must have some basic coding functionality, i.e. syntax highlight
• Must have some kind of "code intelligence", i.e. LSP
• Must allow the user to compose tools
• Must be scriptable and extensible

TJ says that apart from this requirements, the most important one is that you are having fun using your coding environment (I strongly agree with this and I'll go back to this later).

In summary, a PDE is a coding environment built for you by you in the attempt of making coding fun. It's a pretty straightforward idea, but its very broad depending on what you find fun and how much things you do on your PDE.

What is a PDE to me

To me, a PDE should be lots of things:

• A research environment, since I'm a computational biologist
• A note taking system, since, again, I'm a scientist, but I journal quite heavily
• A task manager and calendar
• A Rolodex for contact management

The most important aspect is that all of this has to be connected. I sometimes have ideas on my personal life that fuel my research and vice versa. I like having every aspect of my life in a single place as all of this different aspect make me.

So, in broad terms, my PDE is more of a "Everything-goes environment", but I like to think of myself as a scientist, where everything I write (be it code, notes or journaling) fuel something to understand who I am, what I'm doing and how I'm doing it.

Colloquially, I call my PDE "The System", since it's something that's bigger than just a development environment, but one can think of is of a "Personal Research Environment": an environment that enables converting knowledge into research question, which are then answered with code.

"The System": my Personal Research Environment

So, "The System" is basically built with 3 main things:

• A code editor
• A task manager
• A note taking system

I decided this are the minimum requirements for me to be able to convert knowledge to research questions to code, as they tackle the main aspects on the scientific method.

For those 3 main aspects, I have implemented everything in Neovim, a modal code editor based on Vim with heavy focus on extensibility. I decided to use Neovim for 3 main reasons: (i) I know it, (ii) I can install it fairly easily, and (iii) is very easy to extend.

I'll write a series of posts going over how I tackle this in detail, but as a summary I use the following technologies/plugins/techniques for each of the previously mentioned aspects:

• For code editor, I use Neovim with a combination of LSP, snippets and LLM to write code
• A task manager, I use orgmode.nvim with some heavy customization to implement a Getting Things Done workflow I'll cover more in detail in a blog post
• A note taking system, I use my denote.nvim plugin to consolidate notes, journals, documents, attachments, and more in a single "silo" that composes "The System"

This "PRE" has taken a lot of time to develop and is ever changing, but in the last year that I have been using it for handling all of the aspects of my life, while doing my PhD and moving to a new country, I have never felt more in control and clear on where things go and where things are, both in a practical and more philosophical manner.

So on the following blog posts, I'll be sharing a little on how I do things and how I combine different tools to achieve this PDE. I highly recommend against copying it and using it yourself: this is highly customized to how I do things and, even though I have tried hundreds of different PDEs, I always fall back to my PDE since only I can really solve the problems I have. I recommend you, the reader, do the same: start small, start adding things, make it yours! It is the most important part of this, since it is an eye opening process and it will teach you a lot of the things you really use and find essential to work.

References and useful links

• TJ DeVries - PDE: A different take on editing code
• My Personal Research Environment