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Pavel Keyzik
Pavel Keyzik

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What tools do you use to boost productivity?

Hey guys! I want to boost my productivity and I'd love to know what do you usually use as a developer. This is my list of tools and tricks:

  • Oh My Zsh with autosuggestion and git plugin
  • GitHub CLI. Usually I use gh branch to switch between branches as you can use Fuzzy Finder here
  • Aliases, like work to open work project, opensource to open my opensource projects folder

Oldest comments (59)

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hodunov profile image
Hodunov

For a long time I have been using keystroke launchers to quickly open applications.
I got used to the Alt + Space combination and use it in all operating systems.
For Windows I find the best ueli.app/
For Linux ulauncher.io/

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pavelkeyzik profile image
Pavel Keyzik

I love it, I've been using Spotlight for a long period, and now I'm trying to use Raycast, but the only thing that I'm using now is Clipboard history and searching npm packages. It's definitely cool way to boost your speed 👍

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joshjm profile image
Josh

you can do this with powertoys now, or even with just the built in search (you can customize what you actually want to show up in the results)

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Rachit Khurana

Ya, I also use that, but KDE plasma has krunner inbuilt which works better than this. And I just love it. It seriously boosts productivity

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Jeremy Friesen

I'm using RayCast as my OS Launcher. And Oh My Zsh for my shell configuration.

But the critical tool is Emacs. I use that for coding and writing; task management and tracking; and any bits of integration that can help me move through my system.

Critical to that is org-roam and transient. Org-roam for personal knowledge management and transient for creating "menus" that allow me to group functions (or help me remember them).

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pavelkeyzik profile image
Pavel Keyzik

I've started to use RayCast couple weeks ago, I still don't use a lot from it, but I love it ☺️ And I've never heard about Org-roam or Transient. Thank you for mentioning that and now I'm going to learn more about it 😊

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mistval profile image
Randall • Edited

GitHub Copilot has been pretty valuable. I used to be more critical of it but it has improved substantially. I'd estimate it writes close to 20% of my code for me now, plus a lot of my comments.

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Pavel Keyzik

I've tried to use GitHub Copilot and this thing is really cool. I'm not using it at the moment, because someday I removed the extension, but I'm thinking about installing this again 😅

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Jon Randy 🎖️

My brain

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pavelkeyzik profile image
Pavel Keyzik

The brain is awesome 😍

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Amit Rai

Pen paper and extra monitor

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pavelkeyzik profile image
Pavel Keyzik

I love to track some work on paper, and cross out everything I've done. It's fun and simple 😆

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taijidude • Edited

Powershell to automate deployment tasks oh and Obsidian to Journal / Take Notes

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pavelkeyzik profile image
Pavel Keyzik

You have some scripts that you wrote and just run them, right? Do you use anything like GitHub Actions?

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taijidude profile image
taijidude

At work i use a jenkins server. I call my powershell scripts from the jenkins job script. I do that so If the jenkins is down i'm still able to run my scripts locally. Also i find it more comfortable to develop the deployment scripts.

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pavelkeyzik profile image
Pavel Keyzik

Got it 👍 Thank you for explaining 😊

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taijidude profile image
taijidude

You are welcome

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nikitakoselev profile image
Nikita Koselev

I am limiting the amout of things I pick up. Also, I try to think in advance of my next actions - that really helps.

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pavelkeyzik profile image
Pavel Keyzik

Interesting 🤔 What if you have to many things to do, how do you handle them? Do you have something like Inbox page in notes application and take everything what you think you can do today or what? How you keep everything sorted out? Because I often loose something. 😄

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nikitakoselev profile image
Nikita Koselev

Well, some time ago I used something called GTD. It helped to be productive, but did not really help to be efficient. These days I use calendar for things I do not want to miss, Scrum/Kanban for work and my own mind - for home.

The thing is that any system will consume your time by having to follow some standards. If you manage to limit amount of things by doing less, but of bigger value, you can concentrate on things which really matter.

In the worst case you can create an account at atlassian website and use their Kanban/Scrum/Project boards. It's free ;)

You might also want to take a look at my article on becoming more productive but not investing time into memorizing IntelliJ shortcuts: dev.to/nikitakoselev/how-to-save-t...
I guess this approach shall work for any decent IDE.

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pavelkeyzik profile image
Pavel Keyzik

Oh.. Nice! I'm just using shortcut.com to track all my task 😆 I have really simple workflow but at least it works for me. Have 3 columns (Inbox, Started, and Completed). Thank you for such detailed answer 😊

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mistval profile image
Randall

Can't hurt to try it. It very often successfully guesses what code I want to write. When working in JavaScript, if I have an array and I write const sum = then I expect it will autocomplete arr.reduce((sum, next) => sum + next, 0);. If I have a string and I write const lines = then I expect it will autocomplete str.split('\n');. When I'm lucky it will write entire functions and unit tests for me. It's not always right and you can't use it blindly - you have to read and understand the code. Sometimes looking at its suggestions is a waste of time. But overall I have found it a net positive, I write more code in fewer keystrokes and less time.

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Ben Sinclair

The most useful productivity tool I've taken to using over the last year is tmuxinator for launching several windows/panes for each project I'm working on.

Besides that, I use a script I wrote to automate setting up any of my agency's projects, almost all of which use a completely different stack from the next.

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pavelkeyzik profile image
Pavel Keyzik

Oh.. That sounds really cool! I should give a try on this one 😍 Thank you!

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pengeszikra profile image
Peter Vivo

iterm2

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pavelkeyzik profile image
Pavel Keyzik

iterm2 is really great! I love it

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hacker4world profile image
hacker4world

For me it's mainly my code editor which is vscode, i installed a bunch of extensions to help with that and i have access to github copilot so it's more productive than before

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pavelkeyzik profile image
Pavel Keyzik

I use vscode too, but I realized I don't have any extensions to boost productivity 🤔 Maybe you can suggest something? The only thing I have is copy-json-path to easily copy path to the value, it really helps me while I'm working with large JSON files 😅

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hacker4world

Live server, better comments, prettier, auto import for javascript, html tag auto completion, quokka i will make a list for good extensions i use soon so make sure you check it out

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pavelkeyzik profile image
Pavel Keyzik

Awesome! Thank you 😍

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Stefano Canepa

I use the same tools plus my ~/bin is full of scripts and I cannot live without todoist

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Pavel Keyzik

Awesome 😍 As I see from the comments, scripts are really helpful 👍

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JoelBonetR 🥇

None so I don't get distracted 👌😅

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pavelkeyzik profile image
Pavel Keyzik

😂 I've never even thought about this approach

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joelbonetr profile image
JoelBonetR 🥇

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Nick Taylor

I have a bunch if you want to check out iamdeveloper.com/uses for my whole setup, but here’s some I wrote about recently.

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pavelkeyzik profile image
Pavel Keyzik

Wow... It's a really huge list and so many things to explore. Thank you 😍

 
christiankozalla profile image
Christian Kozalla

When I tried Copilot, it was a very different working experience: mostly because I was constantly evaluating if Copilots code suggestion was suitable or not. So I removed the extension

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Red Ochsenbein (he/him)

Yeah. To me it felt like having to coach a Junior dev all the time.