Best video editing apps for taking creative breaks from coding?

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Hey everyone! :wave:

I’m pretty new here and have been spending a lot of my free time on Exercism working through the Python and JavaScript tracks. I genuinely love the structure, but I’ve started noticing that staring at code for hours makes me feel mentally fried, so I’ve been trying to find creative side hobbies that give my brain a real break from the screen.

Lately I’ve been getting into short-form video editing on my phone as a way to decompress between exercise sessions — it’s hands-on, visual, and feels nothing like the kind of problem-solving I do in the editor. I picked up CapCut a few weeks ago and it has been surprisingly fun, and there’s a great place to grab the latest build at this website if anyone wants to give it a try.

A few questions for the rest of the community:

  • Do you do any creative side hobby (music, drawing, video, writing) to balance out heavy coding days?
  • If you edit videos, what tools do you use and why?
  • Any tips for keeping the “learning new things” mindset alive when switching between programming practice and a completely different skill?

Curious to hear how everyone else recharges!

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Like yourself, I do video editing and dabble in videography and cinematography as well and been wanting to buy a full-frame video camera but it’s a very expensive hobby to get started with, I figured getting a smaller camera would be the best path for me to do video editing so I got the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 and it’s been worth-while for me.

For video-editing, I use Kdenlive because open-source :smiley: on Apple64 macOS and to be honest it’s a bit of a pain to use since it’s not really well integrated with the ecosystem but fortunately it’s open-source so I can make local changes to make it work for my machine