There’s a lot of things that goes into a developers setup and I find it similar to an authors quirky needs when writing. I myself need a lot of screen real-estate and want my development machine to be at least a 2 screen setup with as wide a screen as possible. I like my lines long and unwrapped.
About me first, I started to poke at development again after a few years of next to no coding. Partly the reason is that I’d like to get a lot better at developing things and partly because I need to keep my brain more active if I am to stay sane. The brainfog that comes along with my condition is making it hard to focus and I can’t quite fit things into my head like I used to which probably is a good indication that I need to step things up slowly.
First things I had to do when I started was to pick a language and a platform. This might seem like an easy choice to a lot of people but the main focus of my effort is mobile platforms and I have experience in Java that would be useful for Adroid development while the iOS is so very wierd yet still so very appealing. Since I had to refresh things I spent probably 6 months reading a few books on both subjects and got some way into the basics again before I started to try and setup the development environment.
Now all who have developed in Java know how many little things you need to pull together most of the time and a lot of things need to be done. It’s very powerful and customizable but that is also a bit of a problem since you need to do a lot of little things before your environment is the way you want it. Apples Xcode on the other hand is a very finished product and has a very painless and slick feel to it that eclipse just doesn’t have.
For the first time in my life I felt put off by the “do it myself” harder solution and just wanted it nicely packaged and easy to get going.
Having set things up as I want them I find myself very happy and a lot more concentrated even in my unfocused state.