What are your favourite keyboard hacks or shortcuts when coding?

1 points by asamshah 7 years ago | 2 comments

Newbie dev here. I'm trying to improve my workflow but trying to not use my mouse at all if possible. Just wanted to see if you guys had any cool keyboard shortcuts or hacks that speed your workflow.

jolmg 7 years ago |

Use i3, and switch the default keybindings from using j/k/l/; for movement to using h/j/k/l like vim. Increase the amount you can move floating windows with the keyboard from 10px to 100px per shortcut keypress. Same thing with the window resizing shortcuts.

Make CapsLock be another Escape. That key is more useful that way.

You can have bash or zsh use vi-keybindings with a simple `set -o vi`.

You can have all REPLs that use readline use vi-keybindings with a simple `set editing-mode vi` in ~/.inputrc.

If you use either urxvt or tmux, you can setup a mode that allows you to control the cursor in the terminal buffer and copy things. This is tremendously useful for when you executed a command and you want to copy piece of the output to use in a new command. You can do it in a few keypresses. Guess what? In both of these you can setup vi keybindings for the cursor movement.

Now that everything's been set to use vi keybindings, get good at using them effectively.

Get creative making keyboard shortcuts. I have a shortcut that toggles the placement of all floating windows in the current workspace to another new workspace. So I can just hit that to hide all floating windows, work on the tiling windows below, and then call the floating windows back when I need them.

You can browse quickly in Firefox using only the keyboard without needing extensions like Vimperator. When you want to click a link, just Ctrl-f and type some unique text from the link, hit Enter until you focus the link you wanted, then Escape and Enter (or Ctrl-Enter if you want a new tab). If you want to use text near the link because the link's text is too common or is an image, then do it and then use Tab or Shift-Tab to select the link you want.

Now, you can put the mouse in your drawer.

Just joking, there'll be annoying sites that instead of using <a> tags for things, they decided to put a click event listener, so you'll have no choice other than refusing to use those sites.

chewz 7 years ago |

Ctrl-A - beginning

Ctrl-E - end of line

Ctrl-W - delete word before cursor

Ctrl-K - cut from cursor to end of line

Ctrl-X Ctrl-E - edit line in VIM

Ctrl-D - show choices (git Ctrl-D)

Ctrl-X Ctrl-I - choose selection

Alt-T - transpose words

Alt-F - jump to next space

Alt-B - jump back to previous space

Alt-Backspace - delete previous word

zsh-autocomplete and fzf Ctrl-R for history.

and many more in VIM but that another whole story