The Development Setup I Actually Use in 2026

Every year or so I do a setup reset. I go through what I’m actually using versus what I installed once and forgot about. The gap is usually embarrassing.

Here’s what survived 2026’s cut, and the reasoning behind each piece.

Editor

PhpStorm is my main editor. I know the obvious response is “why not VS Code” and the honest answer is: I tried VS Code for six months in 2024 and kept coming back. PhpStorm’s refactoring, database tools, and multi-language support without extension hunting is worth the cost. I work across PHP, TypeScript, and Python regularly enough that a generalist IDE makes more sense than assembling one from plugins.

Font: MonoLisa. I’ve tried most of the popular mono fonts and this is the one I stop noticing, which is exactly what I want from a coding font. The ligatures are tasteful. The italic variant is used as a separate weight, not just slanted, which matters more than it should.

Terminal

Warp as the terminal emulator. The AI features aren’t why I use it. The real reason is the command history UX and the session management. I keep three named sessions open: deliver (current project work), logs (production tailing), and scratch (experiments I’m not ready to commit). Within each I have tmux for pane splits.

This sounds like overkill and maybe it is, but the separation keeps my head clear about what context I’m in.

Stack defaults

Most of what I build now falls into one of two categories: content sites or product prototypes.

For content sites, the default is: Astro for the build, Tailwind CSS v4 for styling, Cloudflare Pages for delivery. This site runs on that stack. Build time is under 3 seconds, deploys are automatic on push, and the edge delivery means it loads fast from anywhere in LATAM without needing to think about regions.

For product prototypes and SaaS work: Laravel is still my go-to backend. I know its conventions deeply enough that I’m not making framework decisions when I should be making product decisions. The ecosystem is mature, the docs are excellent, and for the kinds of products I build, anything data-heavy with real user workflows, it’s still the tool that lets me move fastest.

What I dropped

Docker for local development. I was using it out of habit more than necessity. For the projects I run solo or with a small team, the overhead of maintaining compose files and debugging network issues inside containers was costing more time than it saved. I now use local services with explicit version pinning and document the setup assumptions clearly instead.

Also dropped: Notion as my main writing environment. I write in iA Writer now. The lack of block-based editors and the focus on markdown files means my writing isn’t trapped in a database I don’t control, and the editor itself gets out of the way.

The actual principle

Every tool I add has to either remove a decision I’d otherwise have to make constantly, or compress the time between idea and feedback. If it does neither, it doesn’t stay.

Sophisticated setups are a procrastination trap. The best setup is the one you stop thinking about.