HIW: How I work, a series.
October 10, 2015
Back in 2012 I wrote a post called “My Development Toolkit”. This post outlined the tools I used at the time to stay productive.
In the years since I published that post my philosophies about tooling and how I work have changed.
I realized that I was spending a lot of time jumping around between various GUI applications. Each of these applications generally had their own unique interface.
Over the past year, I’ve tried to standardize the interfaces of the applications that I am using. I’ve replaced a lot of my existing GUI programs with customizable CLI based counterparts.
One of the key benefits of these applications is the ability to map custom key bindings. I’d prefer to interface with applications through my keyboard and not have to shift to my mouse.
Using a standardized set of navigational key bindings has boosted the efficiency of my work. Most of my applications are using standard VIM (hjkl) motion bindings to navigate.
With this new knowledge, I plan to write an ongoing series of “How I Work” posts over the course of the next few months.
Each post in the series will be about one tool or process that I’ve integrated into my daily workflow.
The posts should follow a similar structure to answer the following questions:
- What is the tool or process that this post is about?
- What problem is the tool/process solving for me?
- What solutions did I try before settling on the tool/process?
A few posts that I hope to be in the series:
- urlview
- newsbeuter (RSS viewer)
- vimium
- todo.sh
- weechat / bitlbee / znc (chat)
- mutt / offlineimap / msmtp / notmuch (email)
- vim
- todo.txt
- ansible
- tmux
- i3wm
- pandoc
- ranger / vifm
- Hemingway Editor / Grammarly