My Frontend Development Setup — What I Actually Run Daily

Setup posts go stale the week they are written. This one is the short list that is still open on my machine while I ship Next.js. If a tool is not here, I uninstalled it or I only open it for a client that already standardised on it.

Editor

VS Code, with Cursor when I want an agent that can read the repo. The editor settings I care about are format on save, TypeScript strict from the project (not from a global toggle), and a file tree that is not hidden behind a dozen panels. Extensions are their own post: the ones I keep installed.

Browser

Chrome for DevTools, because that is what most of the users I ship to are on. I keep one Firefox window for a second rendering engine when a layout bug only shows up there. React DevTools and the Network panel get more use than any CSS inspector extension. Lighthouse is a check, not the job. I trust field data when I have it, and a hard reload with the cache disabled when I do not.

Terminal and local apps

• Node current LTS, one version per repo via the version the project already documents.
• npm when the repo has a package-lock. I do not mix package managers in one project.
• Git on the command line for anything that is more than a one-file commit.
• next dev on port 3000, and I do not keep three copies of the same app running.

What I stopped recommending

A second theme for every framework, a global Prettier config that fights the repo, and a VPN full of "must-have" CLIs I cannot explain in a standup. The setup that survives is the one a teammate can clone and run with the README. That is also why the Next.js and TypeScript setup lives in the repo, not in my dotfiles.