Containerized code IDE

code is a containerized IDE, that runs in the terminal and is based on tmux and neovim. That means you can run it on a machine without X server or even within an SSH terminal session.

The podman containerization makes the development environment not only more secure but also reproducible. If something in the editor were to break, restarting it would create a fresh container. Since only the current working directory is mounted into the container, the editor plugins and code dependencies can't directly access any other files on your system. In combination with code reviews on your code hosting platform of trust, this might even be a reasonable trade-off between security and productivity.

Variants

The beauty of code is, that you can easily specify a separate development environment for each of your coding workflows by writing a Containerfile and building it. When starting code, you simply specify the variant you'd like to use on the command line.

The default and most basic variant is core. It contains the shell configuration and a basic neovim setup, that doesn't use any third party plugins and therefore is the most secure choice. The basic variant contains git and a bunch of plugins and configurations for integration with tmux, file tree navigation, completion, quick editing and visuals. It doesn't contain any language runtimes, libraries or LSP servers though. Any language or workflow-specific variants can be built on top of basic.

Using code

After cloning the repository and making sure, that podman is installed on your machine, you can build all images by executing ./build.sh or only selected variants by passing them as command line arguments. The core and basic variants need to be built before any variants depending on them.

Now you can link the code script to some directory in your $PATH (e. g. ln -s "$(pwd)/code" ~/.local/bin/code) and edit your first file by executing code my-file.txt. Some flags at the beginning of the command are interpreted by code, everything else gets passed to neovim. To learn more about codes command line flags, execute code --help.

Building new variants

Simply copy the template directory, add you alpine packages and further instructions to the Containerfile, add additional neovim configuration files etc. and build your variant with ./build.sh my-variant. You can now run it by executing code --my-variant.

Please consider the files in the template directory for further instructions on installing packages, configuring neovim, installing and configuring plugins etc.