Developer Experience Improvements

Here are a few tips and tools that I use that may be useful to improve your productivity:

Keyboard / Input

• Increase your key repeat speed.

  • In Mac, open your search (CMD-Space), and type in keyboard. Open the keyboard settings.
  • Set "Key repeat speed" and "Delay until repeat" all the way to the right.
  • This will allow you to scroll much faster using left/right arrow, etc.

• Use quick text shortcuts for moving around. These generally work in most inputs / terminals / code editors.

  • Alt-ArrowKeys to quickly scroll across per-word.
  • Ctrl-A to go the beginning of input / line.
  • Ctrl-E to go to the end of an input / line.

General

• Memorize regex characters so when you see one its at least somewhat legible to you.
• Cmd-Shift-T to open a browser tab you just closed.

Tools:

VSCode Extensions

• Copy Github Permalink
  • Use to link exact lines of code with others
• Gitlens
  • Quickly look at the PR / commit of a particular line in a file

Github

• Have a bookmark directly to your open pull requests handy, e.g. for me.
• The notifications tab can be messy but it is far better than trying to manage it over email once you can get the hang of it. I've yet to explore 3rd party tools for this. I've heard good things about graphite.

Terminal

• Ctrl-R to search through your history.
• Learn tools like awk, sed, jq (or at least know what they are so you can point chat-GPT in the right direction).
• I set a global hotkey for my iTerm to option-~.

Other

• I use the Rectangle mac plugin for window management / hotkeys.
• I use Flow as a pomodoro timer. Will expand on how I use a timer in the future.