Coding and comfort

My neck hurt and my low back was slightly twisted. My stiff fingers and the pain in my arms and shoulders desperately begged me for a change. I could have browsed the web for ergonomic solutions for programmers but as I was teaching myself to code full time every cent had to be spent wisely. Like a bug in my code, I started to dissect the reasons behind all this coordinated and unhealthy body contorsion. It took some time but it was worthy.

When I started coding with C++ I didn't know much about code editors except for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. I was already familiar with them because they were very popular in the video game industry although that never meant I liked them, quite the contrary. On one hand, Visual Studio very long startup time plus bloated installation annoyed me. On the other, Visual Studio Code mouse-keyboard workflow was in eternal conflict with my piano technique. I couldn't stand them anymore so I just ditched them.

I tried Atom for just a while but the packages I needed were broken. There were lots of other editors around the Internet but none of them had a mouseless workflow that didn't go against my hands. Then I felt tired of not being able to work smoothly so I surfed the web for longer until Vim waved me from a secluded shore. I watched youtube videos and saw a few websites about it before I decided to make it my default editor.

The vim mania stopped when I coded in Python because Vim's imported LSP plugin for python worked badly and I had lots of trouble setting up the editor to my personal taste. I explored more modal editors until I found Helix but it didn't have tabs and its words auto selection wasn't any comfortable to work with. That made me changed to Neovim, a version of Vim that incorporated Lua language for its configuration. I finally had an editor that I could use for a long time.

My setup is based on this video. You won't see its source code repository until my next post.