Comment by ryan-c

I use vim, and program mostly in Python, Rust, TypeScript, JavaScript, C, and Bash. There are about a dozen other languages I use on occasion.

My vim configuration is moderately customized, and I regularly write code on systems I SSH into since my personal laptop is a Pixelbook.

The main things I rely on are syntax checking plugins.

I use ripgrep to find stuff in codebases, and when I'm working seriously I use an ultrawide monitor with plenty of screen space to have documentation I can glance at open.

I have a significant collection of small libraries I've written for common tasks, and often refer back to my own code across projects to figure out how to do things. Metaprogramming is something I do often too.

As another person said, thinking is my main constraint when working, not actually writing the code.

It should also be noted that I'm not primarily a "Software Engineer". I'm a Principal Security Engineer at a big tech company. If I'm working on actual code, it's generally "interesting", either a hard problem at work, or a personal side project. There tends not to be much boilerplate.

For TypeScript/JavaScript in particular, something like copilot would get in my way, as my style for this languages is extremely non-standard.

I'm not sure how much any of my coding habits have to do with it, but I regularly tear into unfamiliar codebases to fix bugs and add features, and I'm pretty good at orienting myself quickly, even in languages I haven't used before.

The first thing I did with Rust was add features to a data compression library without any prior exposure to the language...