Curtis Rueden is a research software engineer at LOCI. He is the principal architect of ImageJ2, and the current maintainer of the Fiji distribution of ImageJ.
Community support
The Fiji/ImageJ community generates a lot of support activity! Forum posts, bug reports, chat room messages, and mailing list threads, and more. I want to help, but it’s rather overwhelming, especially taken together with new development efforts and collaborations that are always ongoing.
If you are reading this, perhaps you have posted issues or support requests that have gone unanswered for weeks, months, or even years. I wish I had the energy to keep up consistently, but realistically there will always be too many priorities to respond to everything adequately, despite all my efforts to stay organized.
So I fear if you need my help, your best hope is to be loud and persistent about it:
mention @ctrueden on the Image.sc Forum until I notice;
ping me on the Image.sc Zulip; or even organize a
hackathon and invite me so that we can work together in person.
Recommended development tools
Last updated: 2026-Jan-28
So you want to be an effective software developer? Use tools!
| Tool | Purpose | Plugins | |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI Coding Assistants | Ignore the hype and the hate, and learn to use them—see my talk slides from Dec 2025 | GitHub Copilot CLI | GitHub Copilot Pro is free for teachers/researchers, students, and OSS maintainers, and includes access to Claude, Gemini, and GPT models |
| Claude Code | Not free (Claude Pro is $20/month), but Claude is awesome | ||
| Gemini CLI | A strong offering from Google | ||
| Ollama | Run LLMs locally for superior privacy | ||
| IDEs |
Super powerful
|
IntelliJ IDEA | For Java and Kotlin projects |
| PyCharm | For Python projects | ||
| IdeaVim | Vim-fu inside JetBrains IDEs – almost as good as the real thing | ||
| Flexible, powerful, popular, and chock full of Microsoft data harvesting! (You can use VSCodium instead, but Python support sucks compared to official/proprietary VSCode builds without hacky tricks that may stop working...) | |||
| Vim | Great editor. Crazy fast macros | Vundle | Vim plugin manager |
| vim-sensible | Defaults everyone can agree on | ||
| vim-repeat | Repeating supported plugin maps with "." | ||
| vim-surround | Quoting/parenthesizing made simple | ||
| See also my .vimrc | |||
| Zsh | Awesome shell – even better than bash | zpm | Lightweight zsh plugin manager |
| oh-my-zsh |
Your terminal never felt this good before:
|
||
| zsh-syntax-highlighting | Syntax highlights commands as you type them | ||
| zsh-history-substring-search | Better command history navigation | ||
| zsh-completion | Even more and better tab completions | ||
| See also my .zshrc | |||
| Git | It is worth the pain, I promise | myrepos | Commit, push & pull across repositories en masse |
| See also my .gitconfig | |||
| GitHub | If you don't have a GitHub account, you don't exist | ||
| Maven | Build reusable software components | ||
See also:
- The Dotfiles setup guide
- Key developer tools on this wiki
- LOCI developer getting started guide
