THE VIDEO SHELF · personalized development environments
PDE: A different take on editing code
TJ DeVries coins the term PDE (Personalized Development Environment) to describe editors like Neovim that you shape to your own workflow. He contrasts this with out-of-the-box IDEs and discusses why customizable tools appeal to developers.
Why HN readers recommended it
It is the cited origin of the 'PDE' term, which HN uses when discussing vim, Neovim and Emacs as personally customized environments.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- TJ DeVries
- Topic
- personalized development environments
- Format
- talk
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 2
- HN mentions in dataset
- 8
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2022–2025
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
For anyone not understanding why (neo)vim exists, or why some developers prefer it to IDEs, I suggest watching "PDE: A different take on editing code" [1]. It reframes (neo)vim as a "Personalized Development Environment". I've been using (neo)vim for years, and don't want to use …
ts0000 on Hacker News · 2023-01
In Vim is touch-typing on steroids> Lua is great, but one JSON file is even better I will never understand how you go back from a very customized editor setup to the one with "reasonable defaults with little to no things to configure". Great talk on this topic by TJ: …
ivanjermakov on Hacker News · 2025-01
In Trying out Zed after more than a decade of Vim/Neovim
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.