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The Road Coder's Survival Kit

twilio.com

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Re: The Road Coder's Survival Kit

#2

Post by pedalpete »

I was really hoping for stuff that makes you more effective at coding while on the road. I find my productivity takes a serious hit when I'm moved from my 27" monitor +12" laptop screen to just my laptop screen.

Any suggestions for this?

Re: The Road Coder's Survival Kit

#3

Post by ispolin »

pedalpete wrote: post #2

I was really hoping for stuff that makes you more effective at coding while on the road. I find my productivity takes a serious hit when I'm moved from my 27" monitor +12" laptop screen to just my laptop screen. Any suggestions for this?

Having a virtual desktop manager helps a lot, along with keyboard shortcuts to switch between desktops comfortably. For Linux/Mac virtual desktops are built in and for Windows there's VirtaWin.

Re: The Road Coder's Survival Kit

#4

Post by RobSpectre »

pedalpete wrote: post #2

I was really hoping for stuff that makes you more effective at coding while on the road. I find my productivity takes a serious hit when I'm moved from my 27" monitor +12" laptop screen to just my laptop screen. Any suggestions for this?

Truly - moving off my triple headed desktop to my X1 carbon is always jarring, especially with merging.

A few things that have helped me working with constrained real estate:

1) Terminal font choice - I switched to Inconsolata last year for my road laptop. Can drop font size to 10 and save serious column space without murdering your eyes.

2) High contrast syntax highlighting with light and dark themes - While I love Solarized on my desktop, glare can make it tough to read. I often switch to Tomorrow (http://chriskempson.github.io/base16/#tomorrow) dark or light depending on the conditions.

3) Buffer navigation plugins - The biggest productivity sink of the small, horizontal laptop screen is the reduced real estate for code. You end up spending way more time navigating up and down a file than on a bigger screen. As I use vim, I use EasyMotion (https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-easymotion) to make that navigation fast. Repeating the last motion in particular is super useful.

Hope that helps.

Re: The Road Coder's Survival Kit

#5

Post by coloneltcb »

pedalpete wrote: post #2

I was really hoping for stuff that makes you more effective at coding while on the road. I find my productivity takes a serious hit when I'm moved from my 27" monitor +12" laptop screen to just my laptop screen. Any suggestions for this?

I know that your question is more about productivity/managing with less space, but at the very least, to make your life easier I recommend Stay for OS X.

If you go from a dual monitor setup to solo and back a lot, Stay will manage your windows and keep them in the same position (and crucially, the same size) when you plug your monitor back in.

https://itunes.apple.com/app/stay/id435410196

Re: The Road Coder's Survival Kit

#6

Post by serf »

pedalpete wrote: post #2

I was really hoping for stuff that makes you more effective at coding while on the road. I find my productivity takes a serious hit when I'm moved from my 27" monitor +12" laptop screen to just my laptop screen. Any suggestions for this?

that's exactly why I hope the oculus rift takes off and offers some high res models suitable for that kind of work in the future.

Re: The Road Coder's Survival Kit

#7

Post by thaumaturgy »

pedalpete wrote: post #2

I was really hoping for stuff that makes you more effective at coding while on the road. I find my productivity takes a serious hit when I'm moved from my 27" monitor +12" laptop screen to just my laptop screen. Any suggestions for this?

I currently do 100% of my work on a 17" laptop (and right now I'm hanging out in a small town in the Sierra, watching a river flow by right outside my window).

I'm not sure what you use, but I've found that just keeping a really organized workspace helps a lot. I use KDE4 and have four workspaces set up: one for web browser, one for tiled ssh terminals, one for Sublime, and one for "everything else". They're always arranged in the same order, and I have an easy hotkey (ctrl-alt-left or right arrow) to switch between them

Re: The Road Coder's Survival Kit

#8

Post by dionidium »

pedalpete wrote: post #2

I was really hoping for stuff that makes you more effective at coding while on the road. I find my productivity takes a serious hit when I'm moved from my 27" monitor +12" laptop screen to just my laptop screen. Any suggestions for this?

You probably won't like this suggestion, but I think the effect you're experiencing is a mirage. I've spent a lot of time on 3-monitor setups and a lot of time on just a laptop screen and I think the number of screens ranked somewhere around #43 on a "List of things affecting my productivity."

As Adam Carolla jokes, if you use chapstick every day, then suddenly you notice that you can't live without chapstick. But, if you never use it, then you don't need it. A lot of things are like this, including, I think, multiple monitors. Go without them for a while and you'll find that they're really not necessary.

Re: The Road Coder's Survival Kit

#9

Post by rezistik »

pedalpete wrote: post #2

I was really hoping for stuff that makes you more effective at coding while on the road. I find my productivity takes a serious hit when I'm moved from my 27" monitor +12" laptop screen to just my laptop screen. Any suggestions for this?

http://www.asus.com/Monitors_Projectors/MB168BPlus/ Something like this has been on my wishlist for quite some time personally. Maybe its what youre looking for?
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