Vagrant VS neovim

Vagrant

Take a look at Vagrant! https://www.vagrantup.com/ In my admittedly limited understanding I believe it offers closer to a nix like reproducable rather than repeatable deployments.

on the off chance one hasn't been tracking it, there were several "we don't need your stinking BuSL" projects when this drama first started:

https://github.com/opentofu#why-opentofu (Terraform)

https://github.com/openbao/openbao#readme (Vault)

and I know of several attempts at Vagrant <https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/forks> but I don't believe one of them has caught traction yet

There are also some who have talked about an "open Nomad" but since I don't play in that space I can't speak to it

It sounds like you're using Nix as a sort of configuration management solution. CM just isn't worth it for managing a single desktop IMO. It triples the effort for whenever you need to add or remove a package, as you must now add that also to your nix configuration. You're supposed to be able to make that back up in time saved restoring to the next machine, but inevitably the next machine will be different enough that you'll have to edit it all anyway. In the end I just got tired of trying to manage my own machine with infrastructure as code (though in fairness I was using puppet at the time not nix).

I keep a git repository with all my dot files in it[1]. This seems to work the best. It has a Windows folder as well, and I copy that out whenever I need to set up Windows.

A lot of people like using WSL but I hate how it hogs on my memory. Hyper-V is a terrible virtualization engine for consumer-grade use cases because it can't thin provision RAM. If I need to use docker, I will spin up a small Linux VM using vagrant[3] with Virtualbox[4] and put Docker on there. Vagrant is an extremely underrated tool in my opinion, particularly in a Windows context.

I use scoop for packages. Typically I will scoop install msys2 and then pin it so that it doesn't get blown away by the next upgrade.

Then I basically do all of my development inside of msys2. I can get most things running in there without virtualization. In my case that means sbcl and roswell for common lisp, senpai for irc, and tmux and nvim for sanity. Msys2 uses the pacman package manager and this is good enough.

All In all, I set up my Windows machine affresh after a while of not using it and it took me about 3 hours. Most of that time was just getting through upgrades though, I felt like it was pretty fast.

1: https://git.sr.ht/~skin/dotfiles

2: https://www.msys2.org/

3: https://www.vagrantup.com/

4: https://www.virtualbox.org/

Tools like Docker and Vagrant can be used to allow local environments to mimic production environments.

There's an open issue [1]. A scripting interface has since been added [2], and updated [3], so there's progress.

[1] https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/12518

Someone should fork and maintain Vagrant with an MPL open source license:

https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant

https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/blob/v2.3.7/CHANGELOG.m... ?

The changelog lists both improvements and bug fixes and there's even apparently some effort to port it away from ruby: https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/blob/v2.3.7/internal/cl...

As a software engineer, choosing and understanding your text editor is important part of your work, as it impacts your productivity and workflow efficiency. It's like choosing the perfect tool for any trade - you need to know what tool to use and how to use it effectively if you want to excel. For me, I use Neovim as my editor and I have been using it for a little over a year now.

This got me thinking about my recent pivot, my switch to Neovim by way of LazyVim to write most of my code, and using tmux to keep terminal states alive after closing a session.

Neovim: Make sure you have Neovim installed on your system. You can check the official website for installation instructions: https://neovim.io/ Git: We'll be using Git to clone the LazyVim starter pack. If you don't have Git, you can download it from https://git-scm.com/downloads

There are several ways to install Neovim. This wiki provides several guidelines on how to install Neovim.

All these thoughts I've shared, I would have them on occasion - but ever since I switched to Linux and Neovim, my curiosity has been through the roof. Switching over to Neovim and Linux was a not so fun weekend of configuration and spending half a day getting my work's local dev environment running on my new OS (which no one has tested development on). But I now have a deeper understanding of the tools I use, and have a text editor configured to be the most optimal for the way I want to use it.