One of the requirements of my job is to send out a daily message. This message should summarize what I did the day before, and what I hope to accomplish for the current day. At first, I would spend my day jumping from task to task, and then the next morning, I would rack my brain to make sure I included all the things I worked on.

I live on the command line. Between vim, tmux, and xmonad, there isn’t much I have to use the mouse for these days. Given my love for keyboard navigation, it only makes sense that I learn as many of the command line shortcuts available as possible. Here I detail some of the most helpful navigation tricks, and those I use on a daily basis.

Any editor worth its salt has some provision for text snippet expansion. TextMate, Vim, and Sublime Text 2 all have this capability and Emacs is certainly no exception. If you’re not familiar with the concept of snippets, the basic idea involves defining a keyword, which when followed with some trigger (keyboard shortcut or menu option), replaces that keyword with some predefined text. This functionality is a great boost to productivity as it prevents the developer from having to manually type potentially hundreds or thousands of lines of relatively boilerplate code.

As a developer, I tend to prefer automation whenever possible. Hours of your life are lost in the minutes spent doing that which could easily be scripted. The classic rule of thumb I try to follow is “if you have to do it twice, automate it.”

A few months ago, I started playing around with Emacs. For roughly six years prior to that, I was a die-hard Vim fan. Vim will always hold a special place in my heart, but I have grown to love Emacs. I’ll undoubtedly cover Emacs in more detail, but I’ll leave that for other posts.