Pycharm
Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
221–230 of 519 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
#222- GNU/Linux + i3wm; complete control over my programming environment. - bash + GNU coreutils; seriously, take the time to be able to write helpful bash scripts which can run basically anywhere. - git; use it even when you're not pushing to a remote. Add helpful aliases for everyday commands. Build a good mental model of commits and branches to help you through tough merges. ( my ~/.gitconfig: https://gist.github.com/…
Re: i3wm I installed it a couple years ago, went whole hog, down the rabbit hole, but realized a couple of things. 1. I rarely ever use anything more than a simple L/R split. 2. When I do use something more complex, it's almost always in the terminal, in which case why not use tmux? These days I'm back to using gnome because ubuntu switched to it over unity (which had a weird multitouch bug that drove me crazy). What…
Working on high resolution monitors allows me to do LLRR splits. Also the couple second I save from not moving my mouse I think is a worthwhile tradeoff. i3wm's floating mode doesn't really make me _lose_ anything, either. All upsides.
Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
#223- GNU/Linux + i3wm; complete control over my programming environment. - bash + GNU coreutils; seriously, take the time to be able to write helpful bash scripts which can run basically anywhere. - git; use it even when you're not pushing to a remote. Add helpful aliases for everyday commands. Build a good mental model of commits and branches to help you through tough merges. ( my ~/.gitconfig: https://gist.github.com/…
For a very long time I didn't use anything besides just plain vim, 2 biggest things to add to your vim use is undodir and YouCompleteMe. Crazy that I didn't have either of these for so long, undodir I wish was part of the default.
I've been using vim for 20+ years and have never been into extensive customizations. That was part of the attraction, because I had to deal with a lot of remote servers, often off-shore. With out-of-the box vi/vim I could get the most done with the least number of keystrokes.
Someone made a comment above about IDE editors with vim emulation. Wish every IDE would do that. RStudio for example is not exactly vim, but I find it close enough.
If only Spyder and Jupyter would that.
Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
#224For me, the transition from Bash to Zsh has been a huge efficiency boost. Mainly because of some great plugins for Zsh, such as z, zsh-peco-history (better history search), zsh-autosuggestions, and zsh-syntax-highlighting. My blog post about setting up a Linux workstation describes this in detail: https://tkainrad.dev/posts/setting-up-linux-workstation/#swi... . The best thing is, there is no initial productivity hit…
Wanted to thank you for writing your blog post. I have been on Linux full-time since about july 2019 and found your post some time after that. Your post really kickstarted my productivity in Linux.
Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
#225Pico. Without it, I'd still be searching how to quit vim :)
But jokes aside, all kinds of real-time log aggregators make big difference for me. Once upon a time, I had acquired first huge customer and had to set up analytics service as a single-tenant deployment. I acquired better servers than usual, installed the service and started processing the traffic only to find out that we can handle only 1/50 of the contracted traffic. For the next 48h or so I pushed hundreds of changes to production and watched realtime charts in Splunk going from 1/50, 2/50 to 50/50. I saved the contract and saved the company and went to bed.
Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
#226- GNU/Linux + i3wm; complete control over my programming environment. - bash + GNU coreutils; seriously, take the time to be able to write helpful bash scripts which can run basically anywhere. - git; use it even when you're not pushing to a remote. Add helpful aliases for everyday commands. Build a good mental model of commits and branches to help you through tough merges. ( my ~/.gitconfig: https://gist.github.com/…
For a very long time I didn't use anything besides just plain vim, 2 biggest things to add to your vim use is undodir and YouCompleteMe. Crazy that I didn't have either of these for so long, undodir I wish was part of the default.
By "undodir" are you referring to the "vim-undodir-tree" plugin? Because the "persistent_undo" feature that is built into Vim/Neovim (normally) is what I think of when I hear "undodir".
Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
#227- GNU/Linux + i3wm; complete control over my programming environment. - bash + GNU coreutils; seriously, take the time to be able to write helpful bash scripts which can run basically anywhere. - git; use it even when you're not pushing to a remote. Add helpful aliases for everyday commands. Build a good mental model of commits and branches to help you through tough merges. ( my ~/.gitconfig: https://gist.github.com/…
My life was also improved with some additional aliases in my git config: [alias] dfif = diff idff = diff grpe = grep
I must forget to give grep an filesystem path argument at least 10% of the time I invoke it. What I'm intending to do in all of those cases is recursively grep in the current directory. "Warning: recursive search of stdin" might be my most-seen console error message.
Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
#228The Jetbrains suite. Lightens the cognitive load, makes it easier to refactor and keep code tidy. All of which allow me build better software. For almost everything else e.g. git, learning how to use the command line instead of a UI is the best way for me to learn how the tooling works.
Just downloaded the GoLand 30 day trail. First impressions are I now remember how slow and stuck in goo java based IDEs feel. What cool stuff should I look at as I am willing to be sold on this.
I'm not sure about Go's specific characteristics, but for PyCharm I love full project semanticly analyzed code navigation and remote step-through debugging. I use visual studio code for most JS stuff, but it's awful for wrangling many files simultaneously and learning a big codebase. Webstorm allows me to search for function calls and other things in the entire codebase much faster. I prefer VSCode's git UI and use both apps.
Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed on gentle approach. I've started using libraries like Ramda for JS, which is especially designed to ease people into functional patterns. I then moved to FP-TS, which makes more heavy use of haskell-like patterns and monads. The hard part isn't the syntax of whatever language, but understanding the new patterns and way of thinking, which you can do with a simulation layer like FP-TS (for typescript/javascript)…
I too have started down the fp router with ramda and ramda-adjunct. Though other people at my work dislike it due to them not understanding what's going on
Had the same result, and had to settle for the middle ground of (lodash | underscore; I don't recall which now.)
There's a lot of resistance to adopting anything with the name functional, and that resistance is often seen in a /refusal/ to try to understand instead of a mere lack of understanding: people put up walls straightaway. I expect many need motivating examples to guide them to it.
Languages like Kotlin are pointing the way towards that middle ground far more effectively than, say, Scala did.
Re: Ask HN: Which tools have made you a much better programmer?
#230Putting this in my hosts file helped me maintain my focus. 127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com 127.0.0.1 reddit.com 127.0.0.1 facebook.com
Yhea this is nice but this simply does not work on all websites. The edge between working and browsing the web can be very thin on some websites. For Facebook it is easy just block it completely but reddit and youtube are difficult so what I do is that I use a plugin called stayfocused it allows you to set a amount of time (for me 30 min) that you are allowed per day to be on the websites you listed. On my second browser I place no restrictions like that but use ublock origin to block everyting untill it is broken. So for example i remove the recommendations from youtube and it's search bar. On reddit I remove the list view so only a single post shows correctly. For me this works way better because the rules are fair and that makes sure you do not just remove the entries from your host file for example just a few days after you entered them.