21 - Thorsten Ball

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Thorsten Ball is a software engineer working remotely for Sourcegraph. He worked on many things there and right now he’s the engineering manager and his official title is Head of Source.

He wrote and self-published Writing An Interpreter In Go and its sequel Writing A Compiler in Go.

For many years now he’s been interested in interpreters and compilers, which led to these two books. In the last 2 years, He’s also been hacking on an optimizing compiler, written in Rust and called tucan. It's still unpublished but maybe he’ll someday do something with it.

He also writes a weekly newsletter called Register Spill (registerspill.thorstenball.com) and maintains a blog at thorstenball.com.

Neovim and Terminal

Love my Neovim setup and am pretty happy with it nowadays. I rarely change stuff.

My Neovim setup can be divided into two eras: pre and post LSPs in Neovim.

Pre-LSPs everything was still very much like the old Vim experience. Now I have multiple LSPs setup, I have diagnostics, I use tree-sitter for semantic highlighting. It's very, very nice.

It looks like I use a ton of plugins, but those are mainly for completion/snippets/... I have never used completions in my life until 2 years ago and now I use it all the time.

One thing I can't live without: using neoterm and vim-term to very quickly and easily run the tests closest to cursor in terminal window. See config here. This is so handy. — Thorsten

Favorite Tools

Thorsten spends 90% of his dev life in a terminal or in the browser. He doesn’t use a lot of GUI apps.

CLI

He can't live without a terminal and Tmux inside of it, so top 3:

• Neovim: Best Editor Ever.

• tmux: Terminal multiplexer

• Kitty: Terminal emulator

• Lately, He’s been using Mitchell's terminal emulator which is still in a private beta.

Other favorite tools:

• ripgrep: ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore.

• zsh: Zsh is a shell designed for interactive use, although it is also a powerful scripting language. Many of the useful features of bash, ksh, and tcsh were incorporated into zsh; many original features were added.

• fzf for fuzzy Ctrl+r to search backward in shell history.

• z to jump to any directory.

• direnv: direnv is an extension for your shell. It augments existing shells with a new feature that can load and unload environment variables depending on the current directory.

That, plus git and language-specific tools are basically all he needs on a daily basis.

GUI

• Alfred: Search your Mac and the web, and be more productive with custom actions to control your Mac.

• Postico2: The native Mac app for PostgreSQL

• Postgres.app: Postgres.app is a full-featured PostgreSQL installation packaged as a standard Mac app.

• CleanShot X: Screenshot tool for MacOS

• Flameshot: Powerful, yet simple to use open-source screenshot software. (On Linux)

Fonts

He’s been using Berkeley Mono for a while now and he loves it.

https://berkeleygraphics.com/typefaces/berkeley-mono/

Dotfiles

He has two repositories:

• mrnugget/dotfiles, which contains non-Vim dotfiles

• mrnugget/vimconfig, which contains my Vim config

He set them up years ago and now doesn't have to do anything but follow the instructions in the READMEs when he gets a new machine.

• The most important files to look at are probably the .vimrc and the .zshrc.

• His zsh prompt changes color depending on whether there's a background job running. See code here. That means he can see if he put Vim into the background with Ctrl+z, which he does very often. It's like minimizing the program in the terminal.

• He also has an OS-specific env configuration, see here

• He can change Kitty theme from inside the terminal: here

• Fuzzy checkout of pull requests: here

• Nr 1 shell tip: use a large history file and a tool to fuzzy-search through it. See config here. He uses fzf to fuzzy-search through it.

• He also can't live without my git shortcuts and helpers: here

• His tmux config has also grown over the years. He especially like that he can navigate between tmux splits and Vim splits with the same keybindings, thanks to vim-tmux-navigator

Desk Setup

You can find details of Thorsten’s setup here https://thorstenball.com/my-setup/

Favorite Books

Check his Goodreads profile!

• Technical:

  • Pragmatic Programmer, The: Your journey to mastery by David Thomas (Author), Andrew Hunt (Author)

  • A Philosophy of Software Design, 2nd Editing by John K. Ousterhout (Author)

• Non-technical:

  • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing by George Saunders