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AskHN: What productivity tools and configs do you use to streamline your work?
4 points by monroewalker 45 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 12 comments
I love finding ways to save time on processes I repeat often. I feel like the setups I have now save a good chunk of time while working, but I'm always looking for new tools to incorporate. My list:

- Vim

   - The plugin for Intellij primarily
 - Notion.so (https://www.notion.so/)
   - for general note-taking, planning, documenting
 - Karabiner Elements (https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/)
   - Rebind capslock to work as a modifier
     - caps + hjkl = left, down, up, right
     -  + 1 = escape
     -  + 2 = Alfred search
 - Alfred Powerpack (https://www.alfredapp.com/)
   - Clipboard manager + snippets
   - Search
     - bookmarks
     - prefixes for searching on Sumologic, Jira, Confluence, etc.
 - LazyGit (https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit)
   - great for quick commits, branch switching, creating new branches and opening PRs
   - not the best for reviewing actual changes though
 - Chrome extensions
   - Quick tabs (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-tabs/jnjfeinjfmenlddahdjdmgpbokiacbbb?hl=en)
     - Not something I use much, but makes switching back to the previous tab pretty easy
   - Vimium (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogbaibhgnhhndojpepiihcmeb?hl=en)
     - Found this while looking for an extension that would offer VIM keybindings for any given text input. Vimium doesn't do that but does offer a number of helpful bindings for navigating
     - I don't actually use it much other than to use "gg" and "G" to scroll to the top or bottom of pages. Marking is also pretty helpful
 - Iterm2 (https://iterm2.com/)
 - Oh My Zsh (https://ohmyz.sh/)
  - I've used this pretty much the entire time I've used zsh so I honestly can't remember which features it adds
 - Hotkey to edit current terminal command in Vim (https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/6620/how-to-edit-command-line-in-full-screen-editor-in-zsh)
  - Makes it waay easier to fix a typo or update something in a long command



Moving from MacOS to a Linux distro with the XFCE desktop env was the biggest productivity hack I performed in 2020. Took a week or so to get things "perfectly configured" but man oh man was it a better experience compared to MacOS.


Really wish I could do the switch to any Linux distro but the font rendering is just terrible on my eyes. I find it can frustrate some people like me more than others.


I was having similar issues on Ubuntu with either Unity or Gnome (can't remember which). The high DPI resolution of the laptop screen made everything look really small and everything I tried to do to scale up the size of things just didn't work well. Things didn't scale evenly, sometimes the text would be bigger but not the ui controls. On MacOS I've found the display scaling to just work as expected


Which distribution have you used? Fedora 33 seems pretty decent in my 4k monitor.


I've used Manjaro and Pop_OS, no luck however. Something just hurts my eyes and I can't put my finger on it. The browsers are especially awful which is what I spend 90% of my time in. See https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/ post which I found to confirm my issues.


What about XFCE do you like and make it a much better experience for you than Macos?


Speed. Customizability.


Can you elaborate on that? What's faster? What are you customizing that you couldn't before?


I have the Paste app, with unlimited history mode. It's insane how useful it is 50 times a day.

https://pasteapp.io

(no affiliation)


Always a bummer when something is given a generic name like that.. makes it really hard to search for results specific to it.

What are some of the main things you like about it?


I like how it pops up from the bottom of the screen in a card-view, and typing any letter starts an accurate search for past snippets.


Agreed. Should have gone with something catchy, like AceOfPaste.




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