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We're all mortals :). Like other endeavors of growth, a good approach is to regularly make a small effort to learn a little more about something (like your too
by blunte 6y ago
We're all mortals :).
Like other endeavors of growth, a good approach is to regularly make a small effort to learn a little more about something (like your tools, which includes keyboard shortcuts).
As one simple example, if you have a URL somewhere and you want to quickly open it in a new window, you just use the keyboard shortcuts to copy (which hopefully everyone knows), switch to browser (alt-tab or cmd-tab or even [cmd-space fire return]), ctrl-t or cmd-t to open a new tab, paste, return). This sequence becomes so hard-wired that you can go from seeing a URL to reading it in a new tab in a couple of seconds. And since it is hard-wired, your train of thought is not interrupted with common small thoughts like, "hmm where is my mouse pointer? wiggle mouse - ahh there"
But like I also suggested, with left hand on the keyboard and right hand on the mouse, and knowing a few very common shortcuts, you can be very fast at getting things done.
In both cases, knowing keyboard shortcuts is... key.
Lastly, there are some awesome tools like Keyboard Maestro or possibly Hammerspoon (I use the former, but have heard the latter is decent). With a bit of effort, you can make some really useful macros and do a lot. Heck, even just using Automator can do wonders. For example, it's pretty easy to make a file right click action that will resize and export an image into one suitable for web publishing.
The summary of all this really is that learning your tools makes you much more effective and performant. Seems obvious, but it's easy to forget.
- paulryanrogers 6y agoWhile all true IME the ever growing stack of libraries, frameworks, languages, and infra tools one must learn leaves little breathing room for modest gains in text wrangling. Most of my time isn't spent slicing and dicing snippets or juggling windows. Rather it's thinking, planning, a bit of experimentation, reading, repeat. And powerful, built-in auto complete with visual IDEs like IntelliJ or PyCharm make them hard to give up.
- thanato0s 6y agoI thought the same before trying to use my actual dev environment, but, at least for me, it felt more enjoyable to stop using the mouse when I was coding. I think the best is just to try both approach and see by yourself.
- blunte 6y agoEven still, cmd-opt-b when your caret is on a name jumps you to the code where that thing is implemented. A few shortcuts like that make navigating so effortless that you are free to focus on the code and libraries.
- paulryanrogers 6y agoSorry if I was unclear. That's one of my favorite shortcuts actually. And I write my own Bash aliases and scripts to reduce terminal fatigue. I just don't devote much time to mastering text editors. In fact I've had to change editors so often that mastery may have been unrealistic anyway.
- thanato0s 6y agoThe problem is not necessarily to be fast for me (I know people who are very fast with the combo mouse / keyboard) but more if you like it. If you don't enjoy working with your tools, you'll have a lot of friction to do your work. I'm not sure everybody would like a development environment as I describe it, that's why I invite people to try Vim for example for a couple of week (I've some free articles on my blog about that) or i3, and see what they think about it. Exploring new possibilities is never bad. About learning the tools: I agree, but you can learn much more from some tools than others. I think of Vim as easy to learn, hard to master because there is so many stuff you can do with it. But I used Intellij IDEs as well for a long time, and I don't think it's hard to master, because there's not so much you can master, except maybe the keyboard shortcuts.