Dance Fingers, Dance

I've been having heavy thoughts lately on how to improve my speed of work. More speed means more work being done. More work done means more time for fun and games and reading feeds. Yippee... We as programmers, are essentially typist. We put countless effort everyday on punching those little cubes with little characters and numbers on them that is the keyboard. The keyboard is the most important tools of the trade for us (Why do they name it keyboard anyway? I can see the "board", but where is the "key"?). So, if I can maximise the use of this thing -- master it, make it my fifth limb -- then I pretty much sure that I can improve productivity. So I laid out some plans that can help me to achieve this goal. Use shortcuts Using keyboard shortcuts, you reduce the need to lift you hand to get to the mouse. All this movement takes time. And when you get back to the keyboard, you need time to adjust back to your previous state. So learning shorcuts, especially for your frequently used applications, should help a lot on increasing your speed. Programmers use text editor everyday. Shortcuts like Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+S to cut, copy, paste and save is a must. If you don't know them, please cut your fingers and feed them to the dogs (preferably the stray ones on the streets). Other useful shortcuts are like Ctrl+Arrow to move from word to word, Ctrl+Home to go to start of file, Ctrl+End to end of file, Shift+Tab to "untab" (or unindent). Those are common ones for text editors. One neat trick that people seldom know is to press Alt while selecting text (with Shift or mouse) to do block selection. If your editor can't do block selection, please remove it from your PC and feed it to the dogs. I use Visual Studio everyday. So in the effort to master my arsenal of weaponry, I try to learn VS specific shorcuts as much as I can. Like F5 is to run my codes in debug mode, Ctrl+Alt+P is opening the process window, Ctrl+Alt+I for immediate window, F4 property window, F9 toggle breakpoint, Ctrl+U to make letters lowercase, Ctrl+Shift+U for uppercase, Ctrk+K followed by C to comment a block of code, and Ctrl+K,U to uncomment. Man, thats a whole bunch. I may have some more here but I can remember it right now. Oh yeah, another neat trick, Ctrl+Shift+T transpose lines. And also, don't we forget Windows shortcuts (if you are a Windows user). Windows key (the one with Windows(tm) logo on it) with D is to show desktop. Win+M minimize all window, Shift+Win+M to bring them back, Win+L to lock your PC, and my favourite, Win followed by U and then another U to shutdown (or S to standby). I still can't find a fast way to maximise and restore a window. Right now the shortest is Alt+Space followed by X or R. One more neat thing you can do is to put a shortcut of your favourite program in the Desktop and then assign shortcuts to them (right click, see Properties). I got Ctrl+Alt+W to fire up Cygwin. I so envy those skilled Vi and Emacs users that can practically do everything from shortcuts and commands. Whoa, that iz m4d skillx0rz. What a great way to impress the chicks. I've been told that chickzz digg guys with mad shortcuts and CLI skillzzz... I just can't get used to Vi (Vim) or Emacs, they feels crappy in Windows. I use Notepad++, not quite as awesome as Vi/Emacs, but I'm just a sucker for tabs (new version on Vim can do tabs also, but like I say, it's crappy). Owh, we side winded a bit there. I think I'm gonna have me an entry on text editors later. I actually have a lot more to talk about on this maximising keyboard utilization topic. But, alas, the night is late, and I have to come to work tomorrow to punch those little cubes for another day. So, ta ta for now, we'll continue this some other time. (to be continued...)