Uses

2025-06-21 · 3 min read

I often get asked about what software or hardware I use, so this page will serve as a living document and a place to point curious readers to when I get asked.

Hardware

Computers
I use multiple computers for diverse tasks. My primary computing devices include three laptops, one workstation, and an HP Gen8 micro-server.

Keyboard

Mechanical Keyboard
As a die-hard vimer and frugal consumer, I use this mechanical keyboard from a less well-known brand. Believe me, the comfort of typing is almost identical to other expensive brands.

Workstation - DIY PC with nVidia RTX 4090

DIY PC
This is a DIY PC with a powerful nVidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, a spacious server-grade RAM with a capacity of 192GiB, powerful Intel i9 14900KF CPU, two HP FX900 Pro 2T SSDs, a 4T HDD. This workstation is good enough for serving small to medium LLMs for generative AI workloads. It is a staging environment to explore application requires significant computing demand before moving to cloud.

Laptop 1 - MacBookPro 15-inch 2019 Intel Core i9

MBP i9
This is second-hand MBP with decent Intel i9 CPU, spacious SSD (1T), and good RAM capacity (32GiB), which is ideal for accommodating a few virtual machines or containers. Overall, this MBP is solid although the built-in keyboard has no physical escape key, which is annoying for die-hard vimmer.

Laptop 2 - MacBookPro 16-inch 2019 Intel Core i7

MBP i7
This is another ultra-cheap second-hand MBP with bigger display and an improved keyboard with longer key travel and physical escape key. Equipped with Intel i7 CPU, 16 GiB RAM, 512 GiB SSD, this MBP is good enough for coding and scientific writing using LaTeX.

Laptop 3 - Legend Legion Y9000

Legion Y9000
An entry-level gaming laptop with nVidia RTX 4060. This purpose of this laptop is to provide bare-metal Windows and Linux environments to test software requires such settings.

HP Micro-server Gen8

HP Micro-server Gen8
This HP gen8 microserver is a solid, small cubic box equipped with 4 hard-drive bays, 3 ethernet ports. It primarily serves as file storage.

Software

I prefer open-source software for my day-to-day use.

Terminal

  • Ghostty is my terminal
  • tmux is my terminal multiplexer
  • oh-my-zsh and powerlevel10k
  • dotfiles
  • stow

I manage the software using the dotfiles scheme. In particular, installation and configuration procedures have been automated by the setup.sh script in this repo. This allows me setup consistent tooling quickly across OSes and physical machines.

Editor

My primary editor is neovim, though occasionally I also tinker with the good-old vim. My neovim configuration approach follows dotvim scheme. Additionally, the configurations are integrated with the aforementioned dotfiles. Specifically, the dotneovim repository is a submodule of dotfiles. This means I can replicate my neovim editing experience on a new computer swiftly by simply executing:

cd $HOME
git clone https://github.com/schnell18/dotfiles
cd ~/dotfiles
./setup.sh nvim

I’ve tried diverse neovim themes and settled on nvchad. My favorite plugins include:

  • stevearc/conform.nvim
  • mfussenegger/nvim-lint
  • neovim/nvim-lspconfig
  • williamboman/mason-lspconfig.nvim
  • schnell18/mason-nvim-lint
  • williamboman/mason.nvim
  • nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter
  • lervag/vimtex
  • let-def/texpresso.vim
  • mfussenegger/nvim-dap
  • leoluz/nvim-dap-go
  • nvim-neotest/neotest
  • CopilotC-Nvim/CopilotChat.nvim

These plugins offer terrific syntax highting, linting, code completion etc across the major languages such as Python, Lua, Golang, bash and LaTeX.

Desktop Apps

  • Chromium is my main browser
  • RStudio
  • IntelliJ Idea Community

General Dev Tools

Neovim, coupled with tmux, is my primary tool for virtually all tasks such as development, presentation, and documentation.

  • neovim is my main tool for programming, writing
  • IDEs: IntelliJ Idea Community (Java), RStudio (R), JupyterLab
  • podman, localenv for containerized applications
  • Terraform, Ansible, AWS CLI
  • Virtual Machine: lima, libvirt, packer

Python Dev Tools

  • neovim + pylsp
  • JupyterLab
  • pandas + matplotlib
  • uv
  • pdb

Java Dev Tools

  • IntelliJ Idea Community
  • sdkman
  • maven
  • localenv

Golang Dev Tools

  • neovim + gopls + dlv
  • gvm
  • localenv
  • podman
  • lima