DEV is in the process of launching a podcast and we'd love for you to be involved! We're recording the episodes in advance, and this week we'd like to know:
What is your top tool that most devs would be surprised you use regularly?
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Oldest comments (93)
The URL bar to convert rich text to plain text
Bro. This trick is so simple and yet useful but now only use it whenever CMD + SHIFT + paste doesn't remove formatting.
Yeah, it’s an old habit that will die hard.
Firefox also has the search bar which is one reason why I prefer it.
Many times I use Windows Run for that
Vs code has never let me down for this purpose.
I love when people paste AWS keys in there
I use notepad/gedit for that. Also for writing anything longer than two sentences because the chance of expiring session is bigger than a chance of a system shut down
I'm doing that too xD
Ctrl-T, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-W :)
One hand and you don't even have to take your finger off Ctrl.
No, I suspect most of us would not be surprised.
Lol, I use Notepad for that xdd
Sublime Text 3 😆
At work, I think all of my pals use Visual Studio Code. They were surprised when approached my desk and found my editor to be ST3 😃
It's just so fast.
There are some plugins that I miss and sometimes I use VSC as Xdebug client, but else, Sublime Text is sublime.
Its search and replace is quite a bit slow compared to VSCode though, it's the only thing that I find annoying.
Best text editor I've ever used. I much prefer it to VSC
Of course I do:
My favorite one is sync settings. It lets me saved my ST setting in a github gist and use it across the machines I use. It's a time saver.
I use ST3 too, I have very few plugins and no autocompletion (well, aside the one that suggests you the symbols within the open file) and I use the command line A LOT (grepping, git, diffing, running tests and so on).
I used to use VSCode but I switched back, don't have a plan to reverse that decision
Yes, command line for git and tests. Some pals use VS Code because it's "easier" to have the terminal in the editor.
I prefer to have multiple terminal tabs to run git commands and tests.
I use photoshop even though the designers in my life tell me I need the new hotness
There's something newer than photoshop?
Everyone is using Figma for wireframing and general design. It slaps on collaboration.
Illustrator/Photoshop are probably still better for more granular stuff.
I'm not a designer but for quick flowchart or figures I use Windows PaintBrush.
For photo editing ? No.
For wireframing, designing responsive mockups and stuff like that yes. There's Adobe XD or Figma for example.
Tab Wrangler browser extension (Chrome, Firefox).
I have ~6 or fewer browser tabs open at a given time.
Windows Clipoard. Win key + V. No need for extra tools like clipx for me. Maybe more supprised that I use windows at all but hey man's gotta game sometimes
Steam with Proton enables a good 75% of my Steam library under Linux, no issues at all. Another few games work, but have issues (performance, crashing, some anti-cheats don't work for MP, etc.), but by and large it's very rare that I feel constrained as a gamer running only Linux.
You do you, but it's something to consider if you aren't otherwise tied to the Windows platform :)
Heard about it but forgot. There's actually one more thing. My wife is using loads of Adobe and dislikes shifting around. So WSL on it and I have to be fine with it.
By far.... A huge margin..... SourceTree to manage git at work, where repos are large, multiple projects, etc.... Everyone I see uses IDEs like intellij but I can't live without the UI of SourceTree
I used SourceTree for quite awhile. Give Fork a gander, I've never looked back.
I remember using SourceTree and remember nothing but the crashes.
File explorer address bar to run shell commands in that directory... cd in windows is so painful without a good history or autojump
On Windows:
Cygwin or Babun for a git that "just works". This way you can have even two git accounts signed in on your computer (one for work and one personal). I use native windows git for work and git in Babun for personal stuff.
On Linux:
PDF X Change editor running via Wine because linux just does not have any PDF editor/viewer that works the way I want.
Oh yes, Cygwin rocks.
Project is discontinued for Babun, but it looks awesome.
Can't wait to hear this pod!!
Something I highly recommend is code linting, it's essentially a code scanner that analyses your code for bugs and other issues such as stylistic conventions.
For example, Python has PyLint (there are other linters available too), it's really useful. They should be available on a majority of editors and IDEs I believe. A cool thing about PyLint is that it follows the PEP8 guidelines where it kindly reminds me that my variables should be snake case instead of camel case or that I need to add a docstring to my new function. Definitely worth a look!
I work on a project where the build fails if you break the linting rules. It's awesome.
is there a quick fix auto applied when possible. I once had set up something like that and after adding --fix or something like that I never had to worry about cases for that project.
Aslo faling on warning in rust was a good eay to learn proper language style
yep auto fix, which works up to a point. I'd rather have it manual that completely trust the linter to fix everything though, oldschool like that :)
They'd be surprised if they knew I don't use a language server, just good ol' universal-ctags.
Instead of a regular snippet plugin for vim I use abbreviations. What are those? read this to find out.
Recently I started using this task runner for project specific commands. Kinda like make, but cross-platform and uses YAML.
And also, I rarely use the mouse thanks to an innecesary complicated combination of tools that includes but it's not limited to qtile, rofi, neovim and vimium-ff.
As a vim user, ctags is indispensable. Wish people would use it more.
just a few days ago I replaced Rofi, thing I would neve thought possible, is pretty awesome; the thing is that after years trying terminal emulator after term emulator, I've never found something better than XFCE4-terminal (yes I've used st, and yes I've patched it but with more tan 8 terminals open in fact eats more RAM than most and that without any goodies), I just found that XFCE4-terminal has dropdown included as an extra mode that does not affect the rest of the instances, even with it's own settings (you can even make it appear in the middle of the screen), so, new shortcut to my i3 (no, I don't use Arch) and got rid of my trusty Rofi, sorry Rofi, and now whenever I need a quick command or run something I just get the dropdown and voilá (I know there are many dropdowns but having more than 1 terminal emulator feels wrong, although I also have cool-retro-term, but is too visually awesome, it doesn't count as terminal, count as eye candy :) )
That's it, I just wanted to share my new discovery, maybe nothing new, but I really like it.
I have had
iabbr :poo: 💩in my.vimrcfor a million years. Very useful, these abbreviations :)Something they would be surprised? My fingers! 😅
I like automation, shortcuts and existing solutions as much as the next dev, but I also love typing, especially boilerplate code 🙈
Hum... I've spent a lot of time picking tools that go well together so that's a tough one...
Well, I when I need to copy/paste a secret between two computers, I use WhatsApp web, send it to my wife, open WhatsApp web on the other computer and then delete the message.
The devtools console for testing anything that's commonscript
Ditto clipboard manager. Multiple copy being preserved has to be fundamental tool baked in a gui manager