My Terminal-Only Development Setup (1)

2024-01-10

Below are some notes I recently took when trying to set up a terminal-only development environment for Python and C++. Everything is assuming a MacOS but should be fairly easy to be ported to a general Unix system. This post will be updated from time to time.

1. Set up ZSH

We will need a terminal before we can call it a terminal-based environment.

To summarize, a terminal is a device or program that provides a user interface, a console can refer to physical hardware or a text-based interface, a shell is a command-line interpreter that processes commands, and the command line is the method of entering textual commands into the shell.

Install ZSH

brew install zsh

and eza for better ls:

brew install eza

and Starship for customizable prompt:

brew install starship

Inside ~/.config/starship.toml (disregard the strange squares – they’ll render just fine as long as we have the correct nerd fonts installed):

# editor completions based on the ocnfig schema
"$schema" = 'https://starship.rs/config-schema.json'

# insert a blank line between shell prompts
add_newline = false

# longer timeout for commands like git
command_timeout = 10000

# [character]
# success_symbol = '[➜](bold green)'  # the leading symbol of each line

[package]
disabled = true  # disable packages from being shown at all

[custom.giturl]
# disabled = true
description = "Display symbol for remote Git server"
command = """
GIT_REMOTE=$(command git ls-remote --get-url 2> /dev/null)
if [[ "$GIT_REMOTE" =~ "github" ]]; then
    GIT_REMOTE_SYMBOL=" "
elif [[ "$GIT_REMOTE" =~ "gitlab" ]]; then
    GIT_REMOTE_SYMBOL=" "
elif [[ "$GIT_REMOTE" =~ "bitbucket" ]]; then
    GIT_REMOTE_SYMBOL=" "
elif [[ "$GIT_REMOTE" =~ "git" ]]; then
    GIT_REMOTE_SYMBOL=" "
else
    GIT_REMOTE_SYMBOL=" "
fi
echo "$GIT_REMOTE_SYMBOL "
"""
when = 'git rev-parse --is-inside-work-tree 2> /dev/null'
format = "at $output  "

[line_break]
disabled = true

Inside ~/.zshrc add:

# shortcuts
alias ls='eza --icons -F -H --group-directories-first --git -1'
alias ll='ls -alF'
alias vimdiff='nvim -d'
alias vi='lvim'
alias vim='lvim'

# history substring search 
autoload -U up-line-or-beginning-search
autoload -U down-line-or-beginning-search
zle -N up-line-or-beginning-search
zle -N down-line-or-beginning-search
bindkey "^[[A" up-line-or-beginning-search
bindkey "^[[B" down-line-or-beginning-search

# case-insensitive completion
zstyle ':completion:*' matcher-list '' 'm:{a-zA-Z}={A-Za-z}' 'r:|=*' 'l:|=* r:|=*'
autoload -Uz compinit && compinit

# starship launched!
eval "$(starship init zsh)"

Set up NeoVim

Download MesloLG from Nerd Fonts

…and installed it to the system.

Install Alacritty terminal emulator

brew install alacritty

Create the config file for Alacritty ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml:

live_config_reload = true

[window]
dimensions = { columns = 120, lines = 80 }
padding = { x = 0, y = 0 }
opacity = 0.8
blur = true
title = "Terminal"

[shell]
program = "/bin/zsh"
args = ["-l"]

[font]
size = 13
offset = { y = 0 }
normal = { family = "MesloLGM Nerd Font", style = "Regular" }

Install NeoVim

brew install neovim

Install Ripgrep (it’s a dependency of NvChad’s Telescope feature)

brew install ripgrep

Install NvChad from git

git clone https://github.com/NvChad/NvChad ~/.config/nvim --depth 1 && nvim

Enter neovim and install the needed LSPs (and validate using `:LspInfo`)

clangd (automatically installed already by NvChad)
pyright (manually installed via :Mason, same for below)
ruff
neocmakelsp
etc

Note that Mason might inherently call npm which should be installed and validated as a prior through

brew install node
npm -v

and in order to avoid using sudo when installing packages globally, we can specify an alternative location for the NPM prefix:

mkdir ~/.npm-packages
npm config set prefix "${HOME}/.npm-packages"

and put the following two lines inside ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc:

export NPM_PACKAGES="${HOME}/.npm-packages"
export PATH="$NPM_PACKAGES/bin:$PATH"

Under `~/.config/nvim/lua/custom` make the following edits

In configs/lspconfig.lua, add pyright to servers.
In configs/conform.lua, turn on format_on_save add following to formatters_by_ft:

python = { { "ruff_fix", "isort"}, { "ruff_format", "black" } },
cpp = { "clang_format" },
["_"] = { "trim_newlines", "trim_whitespace" },

In configs/overrides.lua add the following to M.treesitter.ensure_installed:

"cpp",
"java",
"python",
"latex",
"markdown",
"markdown_inline",

and the following to M.mason.ensure_installed:

-- c/cpp stuff
"clangd",
"clang-format",

-- py stuff
"ruff",

In init.lua add the following (you don’t need to include the markdown.css file unless you actually have one just like me):

local g = vim.g
local opt = vim.opt

-- Indenting
opt.expandtab = true
opt.shiftwidth = 4
opt.smartindent = true
opt.tabstop = 4
opt.softtabstop = 4

-- MarkdownPreview

g.mkdp_theme = 'light'
g.mkdp_markdown_css = '~/configs/nvim/lua/custom/markdown.css'
g.mkdp_port = '8842'

In plugins.lua uncomment the line of event = "BufWritePre", then include the package MarkdownPreview:

{
  "iamcco/markdown-preview.nvim",
  cmd = { "MarkdownPreviewToggle", "MarkdownPreview", "MarkdownPreviewStop" },
  ft = { "markdown" },
  build = function() vim.fn["mkdp#util#install"]() end,
},