Today I’ve decided to talk about the tools I use on a day-to-day basis. Why? Because I love them. That’s it, now you know that I’m not going to be objective. This being said, if you don’t know or havn’t tried them yet, then maybe now is a good time to do so and make your own opinion about it.

Note: I’m using Ubuntu with gnome but most of the stuff I talk about is working on OS X too.

But enough talking… : p

Z

z… yes this is its name. z is probably one of the most useful things I’ve discovered the past year. z is actually a script that remembers where you’ve cd for the past x days/weeks/months (I don’t know the threshold) and saves you a tremendous amount of time.

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cd /home/neil/dev/prism_secret_project

Here I’m using the cd command as usual (well at least if you’re not using zsh, but we’ll get to that later) to enter my prism_secret_project/ directory. Now that I’ve done this once, z is aware of that directory. I can just type

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z pris

for instance, hit tab and z will autocomplete my command:

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z /home/neil/dev/prism_secret_project

At this point you just have to hit Enter to navigate to that directory.

You probably get it by now, z is some sort of fuzzy matching tool for navigating on your os.

Here you will find the script and the installation instructions: https://github.com/rupa/z.

zsh with oh-my-zsh

zsh stands for Z Shell and replaces the default shell (bash). Let’s see what we can do with it.

First you do not need to use cd anymore. Typing a directory name as a command and hitting tab or Enter is now enough to navigate.

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/home/neil/dev/prism_secret_project

Just hit Enter and you’ll be there. You don’t have to hit tab to autocomplete each directory, you can just type:

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/h/n/d/pr
# => hit tab here
/home/neil/dev/prism_secret_project

zsh will offer suggestions when you hit tab and when multiple directories/commands match what you’ve typed. What comes in handy here is that you can actually navigate through these suggestions with the arrow keys.

When you make a typo, zsh will try and find the closest command. For instance if you type something like lls instead of ls…:

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lls
zsh: correct 'lls' to 'ls' [nyae]?

Here you have four choices: no, yes, abort, edit. No will continue and execute the previously entered command. Yes will use the suggestion. Abort will just abort everything (pretty much straightforward huh) and edit will allow you to edit your command if you wanted to type something similar.

With oh-my-zsh you’ll be able to get a cool terminal theme and syntax highlighting. You’ll also be able to see all the time the git branch you’re currently using on your prompt:

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-> requiremind.github.io git:(source)

oh-my-zsh brings with him a great number of plugins and really handy aliases. For instance when I’m using git I always use these commands instead of the old ones:

• gst for git status
• gp for git push
• gl for git pull
• gco for git checkout

Some say that zsh can make coffee but I havn’t tried yet…

You should not have any problem finding installation instructions for zsh, here is the page you’ll be looking for if you think about using oh-my-zsh: https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh.

Sublime Text

I won’t go into details here, there are already plenty of blog posts that talk about Sublime Text and the whys and hows as to why it works wonders. So I’m just gonna give you the main “shortcuts” I use that made me first like the editor and then love it.

• you can actually ctrl + click on your document to place multiple cursors and edit multiple things the same way and at the same time
• select some text and then hit ctrl + d multiple times: this will highlight all the occurencies of that text in the document allowing a quick edit again
• use ctrl + c to copy the current line directly, ctrl + v to paste it above the line you’re at, use ctrl + x to cut the line and ctrl + l to select it
• use ctrl + shift + up/down to move the line
• use ctrl + p to fuzzy open documents
• use ctrl + shift + p then type ssjs and hit Enter to set the current highlighting to javascript for instance (Set Syntax: JavaScript)

And some more advantages:

• you can set a layout with one to four columns and one to four rows
• when you click on a file, you get to see a preview of that file without having to open it

That’s it for today! : )

Don’t hesitate to share your tips below!