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Developer Productivity - The Red Pill

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Re: Developer Productivity - The Red Pill

#11

Post by alexkiwi »

xxpor wrote: post #6
alexkiwi wrote: post #2

"If you get regular Facebook updates, Twitter updates, or any other kind of updates which steals your attention, even if its just for a few seconds, I'm willing to bet that you're working at 50% of your full capacity." Leechblock is incredible for this reason, its saved me so many times. Great read although I disagree with cutting out tea, forcing myself to take tea breaks every few hours of the day has lead to some…

You could try drinking decaf tea.

herbal tea does not contain caffeine, although its not really tea, it is delicious. I make a mean blueberry + orange combo

Re: Developer Productivity - The Red Pill

#13

Post by mpg33 »

alexkiwi wrote: post #2

"If you get regular Facebook updates, Twitter updates, or any other kind of updates which steals your attention, even if its just for a few seconds, I'm willing to bet that you're working at 50% of your full capacity." Leechblock is incredible for this reason, its saved me so many times. Great read although I disagree with cutting out tea, forcing myself to take tea breaks every few hours of the day has lead to some…

along with avoiding caffeine(except some green tea)...i would include exercise, particularly cardiovascular activities such as running

Re: Developer Productivity - The Red Pill

#14

Post by yozhik »

_3ex7 wrote: post #10

In regards to number 7: >7. Use a tiling WM I recall reading a Plan 9 pdf on the Acme editor (sorry cant find it right now). A unique feature to that text editor is that it is heavily mouse-based. This is contrary to many peoples (myself, at the time, included) belief that both hands on the keyboard equals increased productivity. I used to be 100% dwm. The euphoria of navigating around with your home row was great (v…

I recently started using Bluetile (http://www.bluetile.org/). It has all of the keyboard bindings, but there is also a dock that allows mouse control of major features. It's been a pretty easy transition for me because of this.

Re: Developer Productivity - The Red Pill

#15

Post by javert »

_3ex7 wrote: post #10

In regards to number 7: >7. Use a tiling WM I recall reading a Plan 9 pdf on the Acme editor (sorry cant find it right now). A unique feature to that text editor is that it is heavily mouse-based. This is contrary to many peoples (myself, at the time, included) belief that both hands on the keyboard equals increased productivity. I used to be 100% dwm. The euphoria of navigating around with your home row was great (v…

Like the author, I use the Awesome window manager. I think you have a perfectly valid perspective, but just want to speak for the other side.

The main benefit I get from Awesome is having 9 workspaces ("desktops"). I use my mod key (in my case CAPS but it can be Alt or anything) plus # to get to any workspace. I have web browser on one desktop, email on another, IM on another, terminals on another, programming on another, and it's really, really easy to switch around. This was a HUGE improvement for me over Windows (and even Gnome), just in terms of managing multiple windows/applications running at once.

Also nice to be able to get two windows to share the screen with a keystroke, if I need to look at two things at once. And in the same vein, tiling is really nice for IMs, because on the workspace for IMs, I can see all my chats at once. Normally for other tasks, like web browsing, I just switch into the tiling "mode" that doesn't tile (i.e. application is "maximixed").

Re: Developer Productivity - The Red Pill

#16

Post by _3ex7 »

javert wrote: post #15
_3ex7 wrote: post #10

In regards to number 7: >7. Use a tiling WM I recall reading a Plan 9 pdf on the Acme editor (sorry cant find it right now). A unique feature to that text editor is that it is heavily mouse-based. This is contrary to many peoples (myself, at the time, included) belief that both hands on the keyboard equals increased productivity. I used to be 100% dwm. The euphoria of navigating around with your home row was great (v…

Like the author, I use the Awesome window manager. I think you have a perfectly valid perspective, but just want to speak for the other side. The main benefit I get from Awesome is having 9 workspaces ("desktops"). I use my mod key (in my case CAPS but it can be Alt or anything) plus # to get to any workspace. I have web browser on one desktop, email on another, IM on another, terminals on another, programming on ano…

Do you use a terminal multiplexer or something similar?

I only ask because my set up was exactly like what you just described. Once I buckled down and started using one, it negated the need for a lot of the tags I had with dwm.

Re: Developer Productivity - The Red Pill

#17

Post by jkkramer »

_3ex7 wrote: post #10

In regards to number 7: >7. Use a tiling WM I recall reading a Plan 9 pdf on the Acme editor (sorry cant find it right now). A unique feature to that text editor is that it is heavily mouse-based. This is contrary to many peoples (myself, at the time, included) belief that both hands on the keyboard equals increased productivity. I used to be 100% dwm. The euphoria of navigating around with your home row was great (v…

I'm reminded of a tidbit from an old AskTog[1] article:

"We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:

* Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.

* The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding."

There are probably all sorts of caveats to this (and the research may have changed since then) but I'm reminded of it whenever I see people extolling the virtues of their ascetic, keyboard-centric dev environment. I'm not saying they're wrong, just that in lieu of benchmarks and studies, I'm skeptical.

[1] http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html

Re: Developer Productivity - The Red Pill

#18

Post by bitwize »

_3ex7 wrote: post #10

In regards to number 7: >7. Use a tiling WM I recall reading a Plan 9 pdf on the Acme editor (sorry cant find it right now). A unique feature to that text editor is that it is heavily mouse-based. This is contrary to many peoples (myself, at the time, included) belief that both hands on the keyboard equals increased productivity. I used to be 100% dwm. The euphoria of navigating around with your home row was great (v…

Amen.

When are people going to get it through their heads that using the mouse is faster than the keyboard? This has been determined by Apple's UI research and known for some decades now.

Re: Developer Productivity - The Red Pill

#19

Post by wzdd »

_3ex7 wrote: post #10

In regards to number 7: >7. Use a tiling WM I recall reading a Plan 9 pdf on the Acme editor (sorry cant find it right now). A unique feature to that text editor is that it is heavily mouse-based. This is contrary to many peoples (myself, at the time, included) belief that both hands on the keyboard equals increased productivity. I used to be 100% dwm. The euphoria of navigating around with your home row was great (v…

I use both OS X and ion3 (depending on whether I'm using a Mac or a Linux box). Ion3 is a tiling WM and about as far removed from the OS X GUI as you can imagine. Nonetheless, my workflow in both is exactly the same: one large Vim window, one large terminal window. I never move the windows around once they're open, and I can switch between them using the keyboard. Once you've got an editor you're comfortable with, there doesn't seem to be much advantage to using a tiling window manager in terms of productivity.

Things like browsers are a separate issue, but if I'm switching to a browser I'm already distracted. :)

Re: Developer Productivity - The Red Pill

#20

Post by daten »

geoffc wrote: post #8

coffee, vim and screen do it for me :-)

Another poster mentioned "tmux" in reply to this comment but they deleted their post before I could reply. I had not heard of tmux before. Apparently it's an alternative to "screen". I would have upvoted you for making me aware of it.

http://tmux.sourceforge.net/

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