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I think my favorite two examples of getting more out of my computer lever are Sikuli Script and Sublime Text multiple cursors. Sikuli Script lets me script alm

I think my favorite two examples of getting more out of my computer lever are Sikuli Script and Sublime Text multiple cursors. Sikuli Script lets me script almost anything that has a visual element/gui. I've been able to automate just about any task that has a gui and is repetitive, in some fashion or another, and at this point I have a backlog of scripts for working with some of the esoteric software I encounter day to day. Definitely worth checking out if you haven't before. The multiple cursors (which are getting prominent in a lot of text editors) are awesome for small text munging and manipulation. by and large, everything I could do with multiple cursors could have been accomplished with some other tool, such as regex's or whatever else, but the multiple cursors end up being really intuitive and powerful for me. I never have to rethink how they work because they work just like my normal cursor but... with more of them. Combine them with ST2's ability to do a search and place cursors at every found location, and I can get a lot of weird stuff done quickly.

epochwolf 12y ago
> Combine them with ST2's ability to do a search and place cursors at every found location, and I can get a lot of weird stuff done quickly. Combine this with excel (use \t and \n in sublime for row and column respectively) and you get really powerful, really fast when it comes to converting information into a useable formats. I've also made use of excel's data validations to create drop downs in cells for making hundreds of lines of complex config for a rules engine in a few hours. Enter the configuration in excel, export to csv, use a ruby to import csv into a database table via existing orm. (Why not use the UI? The app is too slow.) I turned what would have been a week long data entry task into an afternoon of copying and pasting out of a another spreadsheet. (Why didn't I used the other spreadsheet? It was in a non-machine readable format. I had to convert the data to the proper format using my knowledge of the system internals.)
- collyw 12y ago
  I am going to have to waste even more hours this week fixing an excel spreadsheet where the data validation isn't working yet again.
- doorhammer 12y ago
  Nice! Yeah, I've done the excel bit with \n and \t as well. I have a little text-munging javascript app I wrote for splitting and merging things in certain ways. I also use the excel -> db route a lot, but I'm working with MS SQL Server so I'll just do the data import from excel to db. I get dirty looks sometimes when I talk about doing things this way, but it's really handy. If I know I'm going to have to do something more than once, I'll usually write a quick script for it, but otherwise, quick ad-hoc text manipulation with ST, excel and the javascript scripts I have is pretty fast and really flexible. Flexibility is the big thing for me. Often I won't think of every way I really need to manipulate the data right out of the gate, so being able to quickly work through and change things is handy.

epochwolf 12y ago

> Combine them with ST2's ability to do a search and place cursors at every found location, and I can get a lot of weird stuff done quickly. Combine this with excel (use \t and \n in sublime for row and column respectively) and you get really powerful, really fast when it comes to converting information into a useable formats. I've also made use of excel's data validations to create drop downs in cells for making hundreds of lines of complex config for a rules engine in a few hours. Enter the configuration in excel, export to csv, use a ruby to import csv into a database table via existing orm. (Why not use the UI? The app is too slow.) I turned what would have been a week long data entry task into an afternoon of copying and pasting out of a another spreadsheet. (Why didn't I used the other spreadsheet? It was in a non-machine readable format. I had to convert the data to the proper format using my knowledge of the system internals.)

collyw 12y ago
I am going to have to waste even more hours this week fixing an excel spreadsheet where the data validation isn't working yet again.
doorhammer 12y ago
Nice! Yeah, I've done the excel bit with \n and \t as well. I have a little text-munging javascript app I wrote for splitting and merging things in certain ways. I also use the excel -> db route a lot, but I'm working with MS SQL Server so I'll just do the data import from excel to db. I get dirty looks sometimes when I talk about doing things this way, but it's really handy. If I know I'm going to have to do something more than once, I'll usually write a quick script for it, but otherwise, quick ad-hoc text manipulation with ST, excel and the javascript scripts I have is pretty fast and really flexible. Flexibility is the big thing for me. Often I won't think of every way I really need to manipulate the data right out of the gate, so being able to quickly work through and change things is handy.