Ask HN: What's your go to DevTool these days? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your go to DevTool these days?

4 pointsankit843 comments

We all use ChatGPT, Copilot, Cluade. These are generic. What's your story of using a dev-tool that's integrated at its best and you love to use more and more?

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The AI stuff is cool, but the unlock for consistently improved developer experience and productivity has been the consistent use of linters, formatters, type checking, strict commit messages, and automated releases, and change logs.

Having all that in place really changes my attitude from "playground on my machine" to "put my name on it and ship it." -- it makes me proud.

I'm heavy on python, so there are a few "aftermarket" bolt-ons:

- ruff for linting and formatting - flit for package management (will experiment with uv in the coming days) - commitizen for commit formatting - pyright for type checking (but not for Django projects) - pycharm is where all the magic happens - pre-commit for commit hooks and final checks before it get shared to the repo

I don't mention all the CI/CD stuff here because that is a separate thing.

Building up this stack took a while to onboard into. Taking it on all at once would be overwhelming and leave me bewildered.

It is nice to have claude or chatGPT around to have around for going into the weeds. However, "trust but verify" -- these LLMs will hallucinate, so you should check the original documentation.

The overall impact has been that I now use template repos where I can spin up a production-ready codebase with all the fixins. Not only that -- it is also ready for others to consume in a predicable fashion.

I still need to write docs, use cases, and things like that. But having this in place give me the opportunity to run faster, ship faster, and revisit old work with a confidence that was not there before.

Jetbrains IDEs (Webstorm, PHPStorm, RubyMine, etc., or IntelliJ is the superset of all of them). Been using them for a decade and they are simply amazing. VSCode with a dozen plugins can kinda sorta replicate some of the functionality, but the Jetbrains stuff is just so much better integrated.

The UI is pretty cluttered and archaic though, and some simple things (like running the current file, or seeing the current npm scripts) are harder than they should be, and takes more steps than in VScode. But once you get the hang of it, there is soooo much power and time-saving features that VScode doesn't natively have.

The Jetbrains plug-in ecosystem also isn't quite as rich as VScode's, but it's there.

Their pricing is also very fair (it's a subscription, but the subscription gets cheaper if you keep it more than 1 year, up to like a 40% discount I think, and you can keep the last version you paid for even after you unsub just without further updates).

I love love love their stuff and it's the only software I'm truly happy to pay for.

After years of VIM, I've decided to learn Emacs and have been doing all my coding and other stuff in it. There's not as much people and newer stuff like VSCode, but the whole ecosystem is pretty great and it's very extensible and customizable. Major and minor modes made is a good model to group functionalities together. Stuff like Compilation Mode, Tramps, Eglot, and how easy it is to add new features to the editor make it a joy to use.

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