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Comment by jackmott | Hacker News Reader

I spent a long time never bothering to master semi-advanced text editor or ide features. Like really simple stuff like moving forward/back by a word at a time, deleting a word at a time, hopping to next/prev brace/paren, renaming globally, doing everything without needing the mouse, multi-select etc.

You can go even deeper and get into deep VIM style skills but there are many very easy things to learn that let you do stuff so much faster. Whatever editor your use, learn to use it.

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Okay, so as someone who is less than 4 years into programming what are the key common shortcuts(not they're actual hotkeys just which ones are used the most) to learn for semi-advanced text editors and IDE's?

EDIT: thanks for the advice guys, I use Jet Brains range of IDE's for school cause free licensing and I'm using VS for my summer internship. I'll look into emacs though, thanks for the suggestion!

Learn the multi-line edit thing in Sublime Text (or equivalent in your editor or IDE). Once mastered, make sure you do this brazenly in front of as many people as possible - it will blow their minds and probably get you an instant promotion.

you, i like you, you're funny.

For the highly customizable text editor like emacs (the better one) or vim, start with a the editor from scratch and build it out. Look for the 'popular' configurations in the editor's community and glean cool snippets from it. That is what I did with emacs and once you get in that discovery and tinker state of mind, you will always learn something new that just blows your mind and makes your life easier.

The TL;DR: dive head first into some editor and try to immerse yourself in the thinking of the editor.

For anyone that uses sublime text 3, the package sublime tutor[1] is very interactive and thorough.

[1]: https://sublimetutor.com/

I've got a few visual studio tips here: https://jackmott.github.io/programming/tools/editor/ide/visu...

and here: https://jackmott.github.io/programming/tools/editor/ide/visu...

I'm not familiar with jetbrains but if you can probably find equivalents for all those VS tips in jetbrains.

are you one of my interns? haha.

It can be worthwhile to at least partially master emacs/vim as well, since these exist on all platforms, can be very powerful, can use them when remoted into a tiny linux cloud box via a terminal, etc etc.

Thanks for the links! Gunna have to check those out today. I've heard that many of the hot keys in VS are very similar to the ones used by JetBrains.

This a really good point that I've realized just recently. I'd also like to add that integrating your build system with your editor can be a great productivity boost. If you watch someone like Gary Bernhardt program, you can see that good editing skills and build/test integration allows for very quick edit-build-test cycles. You can iterate fast and catch stupid mistakes early.

I agree with this. For the past 6 months I've been trying to master emacs and, from a personal point-of-view, seen my productivity climb. Learning emacs helped with a lot of other programs too. For example, C-a takes you to the front of the line and C-e takes you to the back which works by default in my terminal.

There is also fun things with movement like using M-f and M-b to jump forward and backward words.

And this is what I learned in my 15 years: programming is not a task done primarily with a text editor.

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