I recently started integrating tmux and vim into my workflows. Obviously, it was a huge efficiency booster. What are some other tools (custom built or off-the-shelf), hotkeys, workflows that were game-changing for you as a dev? I'm interested in hearing about anything and everything (stuff from ctrl+l to clear the terminal to little-known git commands to larger-scale strategies like CI/CD)
Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
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Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#2C-r for interactive history search
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#3fzf, ripgrep, fd, tree, fish shell with z plugin.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#4Learning basic *nix commands like sed, awk, and grep has helped me so much. I still frequently google/manpage them, but I often find myself thinking "I can do this with X in just a few seconds!"
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#5password manager
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#6TextExpander. You can take your most common code snippets, table names, etc., and have shortcuts that expand to the full length. I used shortcut expansion around 10-20 times every day, which saves me about a couple hours per month (based on their internal analytics report).
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#7RTFM (as in Read The Fine Manual).
To me, the key for being productivity is understand throughly the "tools" we use: IDE, languages, libraries, framework cli, os, shell,... Read the implementation, the docs, the issue tracker, even the git history if you have time.
When I started to learn vim, I tried many popular distribution without understand each of the plugins they included. And I almost gave up learning vim. It's until I start to read the vim manual, learn the key strokes one by one and then building my own distribution, that's when I really know how to use vim. Even so, I still learn many great things from books like Practical Vim by Drew Neil (on Tmux, there's Tmux 2: Productive Mouse-Free Development)
I think you might already know that, but still shooting here for some quick tips. I don't have any shortcut, just that motto.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#8Only work on one task at a time.
Do small tasks immediately - reply to that email, merge from master, do that CR, etc. Delaying small tasks tends to abandon them.
Keep your workspace clean (physical & virtual).
Update docs as you use them.
Say "No" often.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#9Learning to write (simple) regular expressions will allow you to find and replace in text files fluently (capture groups are especially useful). It's a lot simpler than it looks initially.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite developer-efficiency tips?
#10Asking lots of questions and thinking through the trade offs of more than one possible implementation before coding. Writing your implementation plan on paper especially helps find those unknown unknowns before you code. If you have trouble stating the problem and your solution in words, that indicates an unknown to investigate.
I.e. do a little writing to help avoid coding the wrong thing.