Wes Maldonado: Data Junkie

Jeremy Miller just posted The first step to coding faster in which he says:

Forget all the Ivory Tower stuff I like to prattle on about, if you want to be a more productive programmer, learn to keep your hands on the keyboard instead of reaching for that mouse.

Yes, that is all it takes. Could be bold and start a series of “Code Faster In ${IDE}” but I’m lazy, so I’ll just inline it for now.

IntelliJ

IDEA has keyboard hooks for everything… however there are so many it’s tough to get them all in your head, that is where the KeyPromoter Plugin comes in. It displays what key combination you should have typed instead of using the mouse, genius!

Install it now and finish your project yesterday! (Results not guaranteed.)

Visual Studio

Update: Jeff Atwood has a KeyPromoter like add-in for Visual Studio I haven’t found anything as awesome as KeyPromoter for Visual Studio yet, but Jeff Atwood hosts these posts that have printable keyboard layouts:

• Visual Studio .NET 2003 and 2005 Keyboard Shortcuts

• Visual Studio .NET keyboard shortcut summary macro

Learn one editor and learn it well (AKA, The Obligatory Vim Section)

And of course, you should probably learn one editor well (Please leave a link in a comment if you know the smart people that have said this recently.) I spend the time and learned Vim. But perhaps Emacs) would work for you. Their powerful movement and editing abilities are available cross-platform and in most popular IDE’s via plugins. I’ve used these Vim plugins exist for the following IDEs feel free to link to others you’ve used:

• IDEA Intellij: IdeaVim Plugin http://plugins.intellij.net/plugin/?id=164

• Visual Studio: http://www.viemu.com/

I’m sure there are editor equivalents, or operating system built-ins, but the context switching required to remember those variants is pretty big. For Windows for instance to select the next three words you can type <Control>-<Shift>-<RightArrow> + <RightArrow> + <RightArrow>, however in Vim it would be v3w or perhaps <ESC>v3w if you were in insert mode. OK, I’ve rambled enough… enjoy.