After reading the great article by Sarah Drasner on productivity I wanted to share some other improvements that I use in my daily work and personal coding life.
I am developing mostly rendering and other game-related code, so my OS is Windows 10. I have a background in using Linux-only for work at the beginning of my career, so bash customization and Vim were too useful to be overlooked!
For Windows I started using Cmder few years ago, but I should check also the revamped powershell. What I love about Cmder is that it gives you most of Unix/Linux scripts into Windows. And with that it comes also an ‘alias’ file, in the path %CMDER_ROOT%\config\user_aliases.cmd.
Here are some group of aliases I use to speed up my productivity!
Knowing your aliases
First of all some commands to know and edit your aliases.
I tend to write aliases with acronyms for faster typing.
ma=cat %CMDER_ROOT%\config\user_aliases.cmd
ea=vim %CMDER_ROOT%\config\user_aliases.cmd
M.A. stands for My Aliases, while E.A. Edit Aliases.
This is the base - when I forget an alias I just type ma and I have all my list!
Jumping around
Navigation is the first type of enhancement I recommend. This is HUGE for me and incredibly simple:
..=cd ..
..2=cd ../..
..3=cd ../../..
..4=cd ../../../..
Navigate to parent folders in a much faster way!
The second one is actually…jumps (thinking of ASM instructions)! When I identify some folders that I access often, I add these kind of lines:
jc= cd /D C:\Coding
jp= cd /D C:\Users\Gabriel\Documents\Visual Studio 2017\Projects
Again aliases. Jump Coding and Jump Projects.
Notice the argument /D to use the absolute path - needed when you have paths in other folders.
File listing
Again another simple trick, and you can add more variations to your needs. ls is the dir command of Linux/Unix, and is another foundation.
ls=ls --show-control-chars -F --color $*
ll=ls --show-control-chars -F -l --color $*
lr=ls --show-control-chars -F -lrt --color $*
la=ls --show-control-chars -F -a --color $*
Coloring is necessary to know what is a folder and what a file, something that should be enabled by default in my opinion. Also notice the ‘$*’ at the end - it means to append all the argument that you want to pass after the alias!
Text editing
I mainly use Sublime Text and occasionally VIM, so here are some aliases as well:
vi=vim $*
vimrc=vim %CMDER_ROOT%\vendor\msysgit\share\vim\vimrc
subl="C:\Program Files\Sublime Text 3\sublime_text.exe" $*
With the alias subl you can open any file into Sublime Text. Very handy combination Cmder + Sublime Text!
Also quickly editing your vimrc file is a need for VIM users.
Grepping
I honestly completely forgot to add the color option…learning through sharing. Thank you Sarah :)
Added the color option, these are the two variations of grep I use the most:
grep=grep --color $*
gric=grep --color -Iir $*
gril=grep --color -Iirl $*
gric stands for Grep Ignore Case Ignore Binary Recursive - more or less. gril is like gric, but just lists file instead of content per file in the search. I use it to just check files.
Quickly going through the options for grep:
- -I: let you ignore binary files. Speed up searching quite a bit.
- -i: ignore case.
- -r: recursively search directories.
- -l: only list files, not content.
I’ll show you the difference.
Let’s search for ‘blipbuffer’ into my HydraNes/src folder:
grep --color -Iir blipbuffer *
We’ll loose color in the post, but this is the result:
src/main.cpp: if (nes->apu.blipBuffer->samples_avail()) {
src/main.cpp: int32 readSamples = nes->apu.blipBuffer->read_samples(sampleBuffer, kBufferSize, false);
src/main.cpp: const int32 availableSamples = nes->apu.blipBuffer->samples_avail();
src/main.cpp: const int32 readSamples = nes->apu.blipBuffer->read_samples( bufferAddress, kBufferSize, false );
src/Nes.cpp: if ( !blipBuffer ) {
src/Nes.cpp: blipBuffer = new Blip_Buffer();
src/Nes.cpp: blipBuffer->clock_rate( CpuClockRate );
src/Nes.cpp: blipBuffer->sample_rate( SampleRate );
src/Nes.cpp: externalApu->output( blipBuffer );
src/Nes.cpp: blipBuffer->clear();
src/Nes.cpp: blipBuffer->clear();
src/Nes.cpp: blipBuffer->end_frame( count );
src/Nes.cpp: // //blipBuffer->end_frame( remainingCycles );
src/Nes.h:#include "BlipBuffer/blip_buf.h"
src/Nes.h: Blip_Buffer* blipBuffer = nullptr;
Instead using the list only option:
grep --color -Iirl blipbuffer *
Gives you this result:
src/main.cpp
src/Nes.cpp
src/Nes.h
Git
This is another big one. Git can have very verbose commands, so aliases save a lot of typing! Again I add generic and very specific version of commands:
gs=git status
gl=git log --oneline --all --graph --decorate $*
ga=git add "$*"
gcm=git commit -m "$*"
grmdir=git rm -r "$*"
grmf=git rm "$*"
gpso=git push -u origin "$*"
gpsom=git push -u origin master
gplo=git pull origin "$*"
gplom=git pull origin master
gru=git remote update
gsr=git status -uno -u
gt=git stash
gts=git stash show -p
gtl=git stash list
gta=git stash apply
gsps=git subtree push --previs= $*
gspl=git subtree pull --previs= $*
gspsh=git subtree push --prefix=source/hydra hydra master
gspsl=git subtree pull --prefix=source/hydra hydra master
See the difference between gpso and gpsom - the second one just using the master branch. gpsom and gplom are the ones I use the most and this again saves a lot of time.
Same for the subtree commands, showing how I update my code using the common libraries names as hydra.
In this case - and this is more a git concept - when working with subtree I use a remote alias, added with git remote add -f 'name' https://....git .
gs is great to see what is the status of the current repository you are in. gl logs all the commits. ga adds the files and folders you write after the command.
Visual Studio Compiler
Some different aliases I use for Visual Studio:
vs="%VS140COMNTOOLS%..\IDE\devenv.exe" /edit "$*"
;= Needed to find MSBuild executable.
vcvars="C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat"
msb=MSBuild $1 /property:Configuration=$2 /property:Platform=$3
msbd=MSBuild $1 /property:Configuration=Debug /property:Platform=x64
msbr=MSBuild $1 /property:Configuration=Release /property:Platform=x64
Again something as msb can be used to build code from a Visual Studio Solution. msbd and msbr are useful shortcuts for again commonly used configurations and platforms.
Conclusions
There are many ways to improve productivity - and reducing the amount of stuff you have to write, for repetitive tasks, is very powerful. Hope this helps and again thanks to Sarah Drasner for the article that sparked the idea of writing this one!
If anybody wants to add more, comment, feedback please write to me! Gabriel
