Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?

fzf.

Anywhere you want to find something, but particularly find something and do something with or to it, aliases or small scripts or plugins using fzf are great.

No specifics because I think it's a great Unix-spirited 'one thing well' and it's better to implement what works for you around it yourself, but I use it in: vim (filenames, file by contents, buffer names), password management, several git aliases for running commands with either a fuzzy found SHA or file, and more.

I was going to leave it at fzf, but as a bonus - bat. Use it in fzf previews, to see, with syntax highlighting, what you're selecting before you select it.

Why do you think writing so many words per minute (170) is a gift?

We have autocomplete for writing code that is likely more of a speed improvement than cramming out "words".

I would think it gets to a point where wpm doesn't matter since you've likely to stop and think about the logic etc.

I can see how it would help for emails and more generally.

Over the past ~half year I gradually established a workflow consisting of a simple directory structure, a handful of bash-aliases and chromium profiles. It looks like this:

Each project gets its own directory somewhere in my $home with some subdirs. There might be various others specific to the project-domain, but these are the most common:

• notes/ contains plaintext files of everything i write down. File-name structure is :, e.g. 2020-05-09:call (:call are the most typical ones). As others have also suggested, I take a lot of notes for record keeping & plannning purposes.

• workspace/ contains all source code repositories, or other files necessary to work. Pretty much anything I might touch while coding.

• auth/ for things like ssh public keys used on the project

• downloads/ Project-specific downloads.

Then I create new entries in my ~/.bash_aliases that "get me" right into the coding-env of a project. Say I work on a python project, I might have an alias that looks sth like:

  alias fb='cd ~/fooproject/workspace/foobot && echo "loading virtualenv..." && source .venv/bin/activate';

On of my current side-projects is a full-stack clojure(-script) app with these aliases:

  alias foh='cd ~/opendecks/workspace/foh';
  alias fohj='cd ~/opendecks/workspace/foh/src/clj/opendecks/foh';
  alias fohs='cd ~/opendecks/workspace/foh/src/cljs/opendecks/foh';

First one gets me into the the source-root of the project, the other two into respective sub-paths for back- and front-end. These aliases allow me to immedeiatly "jump into a project" from any open terminal.

Lastly, I started employing chrome/chromium's user-profiles to seperate browsing for each project. This isolates work-related browsing from my personal activity (cookies, logins, passwords etc), and provides a nice cognitive barrier against procrastination. I'm not logged into any social networks on those work-profiles and switching to my private profile to browse facebook is a more concious act than opening a new tab in the current window. Each browser profile is set-up to save all downloads to the project-specific `./downloads` directory, again not to mingle (potentially confidential) resources.

I haven't automated any of the above steps, because it's so simple and takes me at most 10-15 mins to create a new instance. This has worked really well for me so far, because it clearly seperates almost all resources associated to a project, while being friction-less in tooling/switching between workspaces (versus e.g. waiting for a VM or docker instance to start). Another nice side-effect is that I can easily archive or clean-up past projects.

Have a user account just for streaming. Then you can block any sites that you don't want shown.

I'd really like to know how you use tig for that. I am overwhelmed with the options and keystrokes that I can't remember.