I’m a junior backend software engineer. I use a Vim plugin on my fancy code editor. I like the command line but I’m not all in on it or anything.
If I was a Windows user I’d switch. But being a Mac user I have a lot of what I need for software development.
What am I missing out on? Genuine question.
Hello from a software engineer in test.
I use Linux because of habit of looking for an alternative to Windows that didn’t require Mac hardware. The machines we’ve been allocated are dog slow Dells, so it was either pain or Linux.
I spend most of my day either remoting into embeded units or servers and debugging/writing scripts to test them. I do that over SSH and bar one I can think of, they all run Debian or a variant.
For me personally, I like to have my development environment mimick (with some niceties) what I work with. In general, I sleep better knowing if it works on my machine, it will probably work on the thing it will eventually be used against. I also know the terminal like the back of my hand and have grown to depend on it for basically everything development. I would never not want to use it.
However, my tech lead runs Windows 7, uses VSCode and relys heavily on GUI programs in general. I would also say, he is far more efficient in his tasks than I am. When I questioned his use of these things he responded “It’s how I like it” and that really stuck with me.
The key take away from this ramble is create a PDE, a personal development environment. Linux is great because your can customize just about everything you’d want to. That being said I’m sure you can customize your Mac just as much where it matters.
Just stay awesome!
Note - I would however check out neovim for the exact reasons I’ve stated here :)