One thing at a time

When I looked into Elixir for the first time roughly one and a half years ago, I wanted to use more command line tools, especially vim . I wanted to write all the code with it and take notes. Cool kids use command line tools all the time and I've always wanted to be one of the cool kids. Although I'm most certainly not.

Truth is: I've always struggled with using a terminal. And maybe learning a not-so-easy, but powerful tool while learning a new programming language, getting used to a different way of thinking, isn't the best idea. It was a quite frustrating experience and it was probably too ambitous. It took me some time to realize that.

But this time, one and a half years later, an important goal is not to stress myself too much. I've wanted to give myself more time, use the resources and tools I'm already familiar with. And: I want to focus on one thing at this time: Elixir.

So I use Fork for git and BBEdit and Elixir.bbpackage with syntax highlighting and code completion (both is important to me) for writing Elixir-code. For compiling code and fiddling around with it, I use IEx. There's always at least one terminal window floating around with IEx running. I find myself using it all the time, I use IEx to change directories, re-compile code, and I set ELIXIR_EDITOR to bbedit so that it opens files in BBEdit right away.

This time I can concentrate on Elixir as I found a setup that works for me. Using an editor and a terminal window for running code still feels a bit different when you're used to IDEs.