So my wife and I had made a goal to write a small full stack app for ourselves this year, and after a bunch of deliberation we finally settled on Flutter as our front-end framework. Partly because it was up and coming, but also partly because it already supported Android, iOS, and Web, and lately it supports Windows as well.

Flutter itself is pretty easy to

; basically download the SDK and drop it wherever you like, and add that to your path.

Once that's done, running

will tell you what you need to install to round out your development environment, which is hugely useful.

But as a Vim/Emacs user, I am much more comfortable with the command line than with an IDE now, and I really didn't want to have to figure out Android Studio along with Flutter development. Thankfully, it is possible to just get the Android SDK (aka

) without having to install the bloated Android Studio. So I did!

This downloaded another

file, which I promptly unzipped and dropped next to flutter, and with a bit of fiddling around while referring to a

I finally got it to work with the following folder structure:

And then after running

again:

And following the advice, we finally got to an acceptable state

Of course, there are still some errors there, but since I don't yet intend to develop Windows apps on Flutter, and I didn't intend to use Android Studio to begin with, this is fine.

Since I'm using

, I just opted for

and

. This does a surprising amount, if the

is anything to be believed, but I have VSCode's plugin as a pretty well-known backup.

I did a quick test drive following the

, and in about a minute I had a web app running on my browser. Pretty nifty!

I'll get to more configuration on Neovim another day, but for now this looks promising for my own development.