Developer tools to make your dev life easier

Introduction

When we talk about development environments, a lot of different tools can show up. The developer setup is very personal, especially when the main topic is text editor and extensions. Here I will not write about text editor preferences but share about some very useful tools that I found or were recommended by friends so far. 

Qgit

Qgit is a very useful tool to see how is your git tree. Especially when you are dealing with a lot of branches and remotes, this tool show you the local branches, remote branches and commits in a very simple interface. Actions like to make a checkout at some commit, branch or tag, merge or rebase can be saw easily.

To install qgit on Ubuntu distro you can use the command sudo apt-get install qgit and then use qgit to open it at terminal. Tip: if you use & after run a command (in this case, qgit), it will stay opened, not blocking the terminal.

In the example below you can see my local branch main that is two commits ahead the remote. Besides that, there is a tag at some point and, signalized in red, the commit to where I'm current in. The image in this post cover share a tree with a lot of branches and how they appear at qgit.

You can see more about this project at its repository at: qgit github repository.

Fish Shell

I guess that this is my favorite one. Fish shell is a terminal that saves your command history and also suggest while your're typing. It is like Ctrl+R in the normal terminal but with a more efficient suggestion that show you the options while typing. To accept the recommendation you can press →in your keyboard and, to keep searching, you can use ↑.

You can check the installation guide and more information at the official repository: fish shell repository.

Terminator

Terminator is a terminal that allows the layout customization, splitting in horizontal or vertical mode. It is very useful when your application needs of a lot of system running at the sime time, or if you need to run and also commit/see changes. A popular terminal with this resource is tmux, that is also a nice option — I just don't get very familiar with. 

Get more information from the official repository: terminator repository.

Peek

Peek is a tool to record small gifs or videos. The most cool about it is that is very, very simple. It was the tool that I used to create the gifs in the past two examples. The first image is an example while I was adjusting the screen to the size that needed, also selecting the format; the second one is how the window that is recording stays in the screen — almost not noted. You can keep using your mouse normally.

After that you just press the button to start the recording, very easy and simple. More information at: peek repository

Gitlab-ci local

This one it not a program but a package to simulate the pipelines that will run at Gitlab CI using the gitlab-ci.yml of your current project. Using that you can run your tests locally, avoiding to get a lot of broken pipelines or have to wait a lot of time to run a pipeline that may fail at gitlab (so you will have to fix the commit added or to do a new one).

To install you can use: 

npm install -g gitlab-ci-local  // to install

gitlab-ci-local --list  // to list the jobs

gitlab-ci-local --file .gitlab-ci.yml  // run the jobs

The full project can be found at: gitlab-ci-local repository

Conclusion

Here I present just a feel tools that could help in the normal days. Besides that, a lot of extensions and packages can also be helpful to improve the development time. I hope that the suggestions that made here may be useful in your environment setup.