Tips & Tricks for Developer Efficiency (Indefinitely a WIP)

This is a tl;dr of legitimate tricks that I wish I knew years ago.

For context, I work with VS Code on Mac.

General

• Learn Vim.

macOS Tips

• Use BetterTouchTool. I have three trackpad gestures I use a million times a day:
  • 3-finger swipe up: Maximizes current window (not fullscreen)
  • 3-finger swipe left: Moves window to left half of screen
  • 3-finger swipe right: Moves window to right half of screen
• CMD+``` switches between windows of the same app. This is handy for switching between a Chrome window and Chrome DevTools rapidly.
• Go into System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts Tab > App Shortcuts. There, you can bind your own keyboard shortcuts to Menu Items for apps.
  • For example, Chrome has a little-known “Pin Tab” feature that I bound to CMD + Shift + P and I use it several times a day.
  • Also, VSCode has quick window-pane options: Two Columns, Three Columns, etc. I bind the Two Columns to CMD+OPT+2 and Three Columns to CMD+OPT+3, and so on.
• In Finder, you can toggle visibility of “invisible” files (e.g. .env files) visible with CMD+SHIFT+..
• In Finder, CMD+OPT+L goes to the downloads folder immediately.
• Saving screenshots in a designated folder: press CMD+SHIFT+5 (anywhere, it’s a system shortcut), and click Options -> Other Location. Create a new folder and point to it.

iTerm

• If you ever encounter complicated merge conflicts, it can be difficult to visually spot all the CONFLICT files in the terminal output. iTerm has a “Triggers” feature that will let you create a regular expression that, when matched against some text, can fire off an event. Navigate to Profiles > Advanced > Triggers > +. For the regular expression, simply write, CONFLICT, and select the Highlight Text trigger. Boom - whenever your next merge conflict hits, you’ll see blips of red (or whatever color you selected) to mark each offending file. Happy resolving 👍
• Learn how to create .bash_aliases, in addition to being convenient and making you faster, they reduce human error!
• Use CMD+D and CMD+SHIFT+D to split panes. Too many of y’all don’t use this, I don’t know why.
• Dump of brew packages:

 # holy grail of git cli guis
brew install tig
 # interactive top
brew install htop
 # cat ++
brew install bat
 # ls ++
brew install exa
# super-set of `git` with github features
brew install hub 
 # node version manager
brew install nvm
 # "man" cmd but tldr'd
brew install tldr
 # auto-corrects your last command
brew install thefuck
# dl youtube videos
brew install youtube-dl 
 # rainbow-fies text
brew install lolcat
 # make the cow do the say 
brew install cowsay

Editor Tricks

• I don’t think everyone should use Vim necessarily, but I do think everyone should try learning Vim keybindings 👍
• Theme & Editor: I use Bluloco Dark Italic, and Dank Mono.
• I rebound the chorded shortcut CMD+K -> CMD+B to toggle sidebar, as a throwback to my Sublime Text days. The key for it is workbench.action.toggleSidebarVisibility.

More to come

Probably.