Dense Analysis maintains and also recommends a suite of FOSS tools for building computer software in what we consider will provide the best possible experience for developers. This suite of tools we call the “Dense Analysis Functional Toolkit,” or “DAFT” for short. In this page, we will list the software we recommend and why.
Vim / Neovim
We recommend Vim or Neovim as your text editor and development environment of choice. There are countless IDEs and text editors available to users. We believe only variants of Vim and Emacs provide a level of customization and long term support to users that make them capable of acting as a developer’s true swiss army knife. Vim’s learning curve can seem somewhat steep at first, but we believe once a user is familiar with it, they won’t want to use anything else.
For the best experience in Vim with regards to font support and ease of use, you may prefer to use GVim, which can be downloaded from the Vim page or installed with your package manager of choice. On macOS, the best experience may be provided by MacVim.
For a graphical Neovim experience, you may prefer to use Neovide. Note that Dense Analysis does not yet consider Neovim a stable development environment, but the improved feature set can outweigh the cost of adjusting to subtle breaking changes.
ALE
ALE is Dense Analysis’ plugin for Vim and Neovim for providing code linting, static analysis, code fixing, and a limited set of IDE-like features via Language Server Protocol. ALE is designed to improve a user’s experience while working on code or even text files, primarily to make problems more obvious so they can be solved more quickly. We highly recommend using ALE work working on code.
Neural
Neural is Dense Analysis’ plugin for Vim and Neovim for integrating the editing experience with Large Language Models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT, for code generation and more. Neural helps users automate work tasks, and works well in combination with ALE for spotting problems in generated code.