Tools
Laziness – The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer. Also hence, this book. See also impatience and hubris.
– Programming Perl by Larry Wall
I’m an efficiency nut. I like to spend a week learning a tool, so that I can save a lifetime of work. Below are some of my favorites. If you like what you see, you’re only a git clone away from dev environment heaven: dotfiles repo.
Tools I’ve Written
- LaMark: A tool embedding LaTeX equations in Markdown files. Used to generate posts for this blog.
- xkpa: An xkcd style password generator with lots of options.
- irm: A wrapper for
rmwritten inbash. Moves files to a trashcan rather than deleting them.
General
- The Shell: Here I can access 90% of my programming tools without ever having to touch the mouse. I like bash.
- GNU screen: Tabbed browsing for your terminal. (Install through your distro’s package management system.)
- ssh: I have my dev environment set up on a remote server. That way, as long as I have an internet connection, getting to work on a project is only an
sshaway.
Vim Plugins
- Pathogen: Easy management of Vim plugins.
- Command-T: Fuzzy search your directory tree from within Vim.
- Powerline: Pimp out your Vim status line with file type info, color coded modes, git status integration, and more.
- Tagbar: ctags integration. View function signatures, class outlines, etc in Vim.
- EasyMotion: Quick navigation of files.
Web Dev
- Github Pages: They’ll host your static site for free. This site is hosted there.
- Octopress: I also use this. Generate a static blog from Markdown and host it on Github. Powerful, customizable, and free.
- Markdown: Every second I spend typing HTML tags is a second I’ll never get back. Markdown is a simple, unobtrusive markup language, that’s powerful enough for things like blogging.