Tools I can't live without

Hey guys, welcome back to the blog. I hope you're enjoying the content so far, and there's plenty more to come, so stay tuned.

Today I want to give a quick rundown of the tools that I use on a daily basis as I'm developing software. I'm talking about software tools that speed up my work, not specific tools for ruby or rails (but I can talk about some of those in a later post. Let me know what you want to read about down below in the comments). Before I get started, let me emphasize something:

These tools are not magic

What do I mean by that? Well, I mean that if you start using one of these tools tomorrow, your development speed is not going to immediately double. In fact, it will probably slow down. These tools take time to learn and master. I certainly don't consider myself to be a master of any of them. However, I have used them, along with other tools, for quite a while now, and I find that since I've learned them and use them often, I am much better off than I would be if I hadn't ever learned to use them.

With that out of the way, let's jump in. Here are some tools I can't live without:

Linux

I'm a Linux guy. Well, I'm also a Mac guy, but as far as development is concerned, Linux is the way to go in my opinion. Specifically, I use Ubuntu because of its ease of use and popularity (and thus wide community and support base). It has lots of great programs bundled in, is easy to configure and do all that lovely sysadmin stuff with, and typically "just works". There are so many great things about Linux and Ubuntu that I can't get into here, but suffice it to say that development would be a much more difficult and cumbersome task for me without them.

For more information, check out http://www.ubuntu.com/ and http://www.linux.org/

Zsh

With Linux comes the command line, or shell. I used the default Ubuntu shell, bash, for a long time. Relatively recently, I've switched over to zsh. I like it better for a few reasons, including the prompt customization, the superior autocomplete functionality, and powerful shell globbing. Not that I've gone really deep into any of these, but it certainly has made my life easier since I've switched. I also use "Oh My Zsh" for configuration, which is a very convenient way to get a great default configuration setup.

Even though I use zsh instead of bash for a few reasons, really the tool I can't live without is the Linux command line. Bash, zsh, whatever. After having learned to use the command line, I can work faster, get tasks done easier, and of course, write scripts to do the things that I don't want to do by hand.

To read up on zsh, head over to http://www.zsh.org/ and swing by https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh to check out a great configuration framework.

Vim

Ah, vim. What can I say? Every developer needs a good text editor, and vim is one of the best ones out there. Very customizable, loads of plugins available, pretty steep learning curve but so very worth the effort.

I guess the big benefit of vim (or any good text editor for that matter) is that it makes it easy and fast to do the things I need to do often. This is so important. As a software developer, my job is to manipulate text. One way to do that, of course, is on the command line, using scripting and such things. However, my primary tool for manipulating text is my text editor. I need my text editor to do what I want it to do, when I want it to do it, and quickly. The commands should be intuitive (or at least easy to remember), and things that I do often should be very fast for me to remember and execute. Also, it should look nice (syntax highlighting for code, for example) and give me specialized functionality without too much hassle. I've found vim to meet all of these expectations for me.

Head over to http://www.vim.org/ to learn more about this great editor.

Git

Ok, so I believe that everything should be under version control. When I was in school, I wrote my assignments and even my thesis in version control. My resume is in version control. And, of course, all of the code that I write is in version control.

Git is a very powerful distributed version control system. It is written by Linus Torvalds, who also created Linux, and it has a great feature set and a large community of users. There are many different version control systems out there, and a lot of them are very good. I personally like a lot of things about how git works (local repository, nice workflow with adding and committing, excellent features such as cherry-pick and rebase, etc.). I haven't used very many version control systems, but git certainly hits the spot for me.

Another very attractive aspect of using git is Github. Github is a web service which is excellent for sharing and collaborating on development projects with others. It makes it very easy to check out new projects, and even fork them and create your own version. Many open source projects, especially in the ruby on rails community, are hosted on Github.

Take a look at http://git-scm.com/ and https://github.com/ to learn more.

Tmux

Ever found yourself in a terminal emulator with way too many tabs to keep track of? Me too. One day I got sick of it and started using "screen". Shortly thereafter, I switched to tmux, a newer and better maintained alternative. In short, this allows me to have several "sessions" with several "windows" of terminals. Each session and window has a name which allows me to keep them all organized. It's easy to switch between them, create new ones, etc. I can even attach to a single window from multiple locations at once, allowing me to ssh into my work machine from home and pick up precisely where I left off in the exact same terminal instance.

It's a little hard to explain without going on forever, but it basically lets you organize several terminal instances and switch between them easily, much more easily than if you use tabs. If you're using tmux, or considering using tmux, I would highly recommend checking out tmux_resurrect (https://github.com/alexsanford/Tmux-backup). It lets me save and reload my tmux sessions when I need to reboot my machine, which is a huge productivity boost.

Read more about tmux at http://tmux.sourceforge.net/

Chrome (or Firebug)

And finally, what is a good web developer without a good browser? I use chrome, personally, but also use all of the other browsers from time to time. One thing I like about chrome (Firefox's "firebug" plugin is very similar) is the web debugging tools. It has a full Javascript debugger, DOM tree inspector, allows me to change CSS rules on the fly, etc. Very useful both for learning how to get something to work, and for debugging issues.

Well, there you have it. These are some tools that I use every day, have improved my workflow, and I highly recommend that you try out. I haven't even gotten into any of the specific ruby and rails tools that I use such as rvm, but that will have to be the topic of another post. For now, good luck trying out some new tools! Oh and by the way, you can check out my configuration for some of these at https://github.com/alexsanford/config if you're interested.

What do you think? Any tools that you use everyday that you would like to mention? How about one of the tools in my list that you think you would like to try out? Leave a comment below.

Vim Motion Commands

Hello again. Time for my first real "tech" post. For my first post, I feel that I should write about the one tool that I use for every software project, every programming language, and even writing notes and documents. Which tool is that? Well, as implied by the title, this tool is my favorite text editor. Vim.

DISCLAIMER: I am not going to participate here in the "holy wars" between all the text editors out there. I have not tried many alternatives, although I have tried a few. There are many really great text editors out that, and I encourage you to try a few. I happen to use vim because I like it. End of story.

For this post, I would like to discuss vim motion commands. These simple shortcuts are key to dramatically increasing my text editing speed. Let me give you a little run-down of what I'm talking about.

At the most basic level, motion commands are just simply keyboard shortcuts which can be used to navigate around in a file. If you've used vim at all, you'll know about the basic left/right/up/down commands, respectively, the keys 'h', 'l', 'k', and 'j'. These basic motions are supplemented by a great deal of very useful commands which allow you to move around much more quickly. Here are a few examples which I use daily:

• w - move to the beginning of the next word
• W - move to the character just after the next space (subtly different from w)
• b - move to the beginning of the previous word
• B - move to the character just after the previous space (subtly different from b)
• % - move to the matching character. I.e. if I am currently on a '(' character, move to the matching ')'
• t<character> - move to the character just before the next `<character>` (i.e. the command 't,' would move to just before the next comma)
• f<character> - similar to the above command, but move the cursor to `<character>`, rather than the character just before it

And there are many more that are useful as well.

Now the real point of this post is this: these characters are not only useful for moving around in a file. Most of the time, I'm using these motions in conjunction with other commands. For example, if I want to delete everything up to the next comma, I will simply type 'dt,'. Broken down, this means "delete to ,". Simple, eh? Now, if I want to delete everything up to and including the comma, I will instead type 'df,'. This means "delete find ,". Doesn't make quite as much sense when you say it out loud, but you get the picture.

Finally, there are certain motion commands that only really make sense in the context of performing some command on the text, but they are extremely helpful. Let me give you an example.

Say I want to replace all the text inside of the current parentheses (i.e. my cursor is between a pair of parentheses). I could go back to the opening parenthesis, type 'ct)' (change to ) ) and start typing right? Well, yeah that would work. But another way to do it is to type 'ci('. This means "change inner (". This will remove everything inside the parentheses and place your cursor in between them in insert mode. Give it a try. It's pretty neat.

Of course, there are many variants of this. Some examples to give you a taste:

• ciw - change inner word
• da( - delete outer (  --  no, that's not a typo. the letter is an a, but I sorta pretend in my head that it stands for outer. Hey, whatever works, right?
• vi{ - visual select inner {

And so on.

So there are a few thoughts on vim motion commands. Sorry if this first post has ended up being a little lengthy. Still getting use to the whole blogging thing. But let me stress this: learning to use vim motion commands will dramatically increase your workflow. No more holding down the arrow keys to move over to where you want to go. No more wasting time fussing with the mouse trying to select exactly what you want, accidentally deleting the opening parenthesis by mistake, having to type it back in, etc. Learning vim motion commands is definitely worth taking the time to do.

How about you? Any vim motion commands or other neat tricks that speed up your workflow? Leave a comment below with your thoughts (assuming that by the time you read this I've figured out how to enable comments...)