Smashing Magazine Icon Smashing Magazine

How to build your own mouseless development environment  ↦

I’ve never gone full mouseless (nor do I necessarily recommend it), but there’s extreme productivity wins to be mined by keeping your hands on the home row as much as possible.

Building a development environment with the shell as a keystone offers multiple benefits. You can use tools that fit nicely with each other, you can customize everything depending on your own needs, and the biggest of all, you can control your entire development environment with your keyboard. This can save a lot of cognitive energy as well as deliver a pleasant user experience.

This is an excellent walk-through on Smashing Mag for those ready to level up their terminal game:

Today, I’d like to share with you these tools so that you too can increase your efficiency and your comfort in your daily job. They work well together — shaping what I call my Mouseless Development Environment. More precisely, we’ll discuss:

  • Why using the Linux shell can be very powerful when working with plain text (including code);
  • Why using the dreaded Arch Linux;
  • The advantage of a tiling window manager;
  • How to have a great terminal experience with URxvt, tmux, and tmuxp;
  • Why Vim can become your best friend.

Discussion

Sign in or Join to comment or subscribe

Player art
  0:00 / 0:00