FileZilla will enable you to transfer files back and forth between your lappy and the departmental server. It works for Mac, Linux, and Windoze, and its interface is butt-simple. A smart thing to do is to use this to back up your programming files to the server.

You will want to have a plain-text editor. Both Atom and VSCode are great choices. These are handy for coding on your local machine.

Notepad++ is great for Windoze users.

Mac and Linux users are welcome to use vim. For mac users, I recommend you have this in your ~/.vimrc.