Welcome to our new Dev Environment & Tools section!

We had originally pencilled this in for inclusion later in the year (closer to our next annual update) but @AndyL got in touch saying he’d really like to see a section to discuss a number of AI tooling related topics - so we’ve decided to move ahead with this now

The section is part of the now expanded Polls & Wikis category (now called Polls, Wikis, & Dev Envs) and as you’ll see from the threads currently in the Wikis, Polls & Dev Envs > Polls and Wikis, Polls & Dev Envs > Wikis sections a large number of them are about tools or discussions centred around developing with Elixir or the dev environment - the kind of topics that can quickly onboard people by making the decision process of what to use as easy as possible. This new section is to follow that theme.

What should this section be used for?

In general, discussions concerning the dev environment or dev tooling (hardware or software) that is related to Elixir/Erlang development

Here are some examples:

• Which operating system do you develop on
• Which version control software do you use?
• Which code editor do you use?
• Which VSCode theme do you use?
• Which Neovim configuration distro do you use/recommend?
• Which AI tools do you use?
• Which keyboard do you use?
• Which keyboard layout do you use?
• What is your display setup and configuration?
• What helps you be productive while developing software?
• What do you do to stay healthy as a programmer?
• Which terminal emulator do you use?
• Which shell do you use/recommend?
• Which terminal multiplexer do you use?
• Do you use Dialyzer in your projects?
• What is your dev machine?
• How often do you upgrade/replace your dev machine?
• Emacs - Elixir Setup Configuration (wiki)
• Spacemacs - General Discussion, Blog Posts (wiki)
• Doom Emacs - Elixir Wiki
• Neovim - Elixir Setup Configuration from Scratch Guide (wiki)

Questions about specific issues are better suited the Questions/Help section. For instance, if you run into a problem using a version control manager that would be better in the Questions section as this section is more for broader discussions of the onboarding type.

Will we move some of the Polls or Wikis into this new section?

For now we’ll leave them where they are. We might remove the Wikis section and instead just use a tag at some point though, as people are probably more likely to arrive at those threads after a search, rather than by browsing wikis (people are more likely to browse polls to see which they might want to take part in, perhaps when they’ve got a bit of time to pass). But we’ll see how things go.

Like with everything we try the section is on trial, so if it doesn’t work out we’ll revert or adjust as need be.

We look forward to seeing you (and Andy!) use the section