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

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491–500 of 532 posts

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

#491

KEEP NOTES. Write everything down. Write down what you were thinking about, how you felt about decisions, things you tried for bug fixes. you never know when this stuff will be useful to you again. I keep really basic markdown notes in a git repo, roughly one file per day with an ISO date name, but some things I give a separate file name (still with the iso date, but with some descriptive words) for things that might…

Org-mode ftw

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

#492

RTFM (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…

> I still learn many great things from books like Practical Vim by Drew Neil

You should also check out "Modern Vim: Craft Your Development Environment with Vim 8 and Neovim" from the same author.

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

#493

Easy, quick containers for Windows - Windows Sandbox. I've been putting Zoom in there to avoid installing it on my machine. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-kernel-intern...

Or you can just run it from browser.

The web application is crippled, among others, you can't have the grid view.

Using Zoom from Firefox.

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

#494

I have such a simple setup but it's not for everyone. It also fails miserably if I'm working in an environment where I can't do almost everything I need to do from the command-line. 1) VIM with almost no special .vimrc 2) gnu screen (10 screens initialized via .screenrc) - hotkeys Ctrl-Left (prev), Ctrl-Right (next) - I tweak my $PS1 prompt so it will display which $WINDOW I'm on. 3) Not a tool, but a tip. Maintain a…

vim has like the worst default setting than any other app in existence in my opinion and I cannot figure why anyone would want to stick to it. Unless you have 5+ years of muscle memory (learnt with pain), all the shortcuts are too confusing.

> vim has like the worst default setting than any other app in existence

Laughing in urxvt

> Unless you have 5+ years of muscle memory (learnt with pain), all the shortcuts are too confusing.

Don't know which level of mastery of the default shortcuts you're talking about but speaking from my experience, going through vimtutor and oni[0] integrated tutorial everyday made me productive in less than one week, without modifying any .vimrc, granted I used neovim, but still...

0: https://github.com/onivim/oni

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

#495
post #340

Teminator. I see many people suggest tmux, but I have not seen suggestions for my favorite terminal emulator. Ctrl+Shift+E for vErtical split Ctrl+Shift+O for horizontal This is a killer feature. It is also much better than tmux because scrolling up is naturally supported. I always keep an instance of Teminator running full screen on one monitor and whenever I need another terminal, I just split the screen, or go to…

The main point of Tmux is that you can use it over ssh as well.

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

#496

If you are using vim, you should definitely try using cvim or similar for chrome. You’ll most probably stop using mouse when in browser. If it’s about tools, I would suggest trying out i3 and emacs. I’ve used vim+tmux for a couple of years. Slowly I’ve migrated to Emacs. Somehow, I like it a little more than vim. I still heavily use tmux. For tmux, having a startup script with pre configured windows and panes can be…

> If you are using vim, you should definitely try using cvim or similar for chrome. You’ll most probably stop using mouse when in browser.

Using vimium on Chromium and vim-vixen on Firefox I always found those extensions quite limited and buggy. As I already posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22642386

> There are a couple of annoying things with vimium which, I think, are general limitations for Firefox extensions, or browser addons in general: - it loads after the page, so if you mistakenly open a link, you have to wait until the page is fully loaded to close it with the extension, but you can always use the browser's integrated shortcut Ctrl+W. So far so good - Letters positions are not as accurate as let's say, qutebrowser, and sometimes when you open a link it's not the right one, even if the letter was indicating it. For a clear illustration of what I'm trying to say, try to browse stackoverflow and use the reviews queue. - When the page is saturated, letters start overlapping, you find yourself with one link hovered by 'A' and another 'AA' maybe a couple of links labelled: 'AB', 'AC', ... and in this situation it's impossible to select the link 'A', you have to do it with the mouse.

You'll be better off using qutebrowser instead.

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

#498

Great thread, thank you. Already seen a few things that I will look into. For 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-wor…

Lots of good Zsh tips, thanks for this writeup!

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

#499

Use procrastination against itself. So basically, when procrastinating, we tend to justify our inactions: just 1 more minute on Twitter, just one last scroll on my newfeed, lemme just check this subreddit really quick. With reverse procrastination, you trick your brain into doing your intended task: Ok lemme just open Visual Studio Code and edit this one file then im good, I'll just change this one line of code, I'll…

This reminds me of the "floss one tooth" strategy:

https://www.fastcompany.com/3022830/the-secret-to-changing-y...

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

#500
post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Semi-related to “park downhill” is something I do at the end of the day if I’m still working on a piece of code - I’ll write a simple next task in a non-comment so it breaks the syntax. Then the next day I can dive in and “fix” the code which, at least for me, helps get in the groove.

Another variation: leave a failing unit test that will pass when you implement the next thing you were planning on doing.

This is like the coding equivalent of Ernest Hemingway's "stop writing in the middle of a sentence" strategy for overcoming writer's block:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3335637

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