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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

1) Any terminal that you can summon/dismiss with a global hotkey. Examples are Guake for Linux and iTerm2 for OSX. I consider this a must-have for all developers.

2) Anything that lets you resize/place windows with hotkeys. For example, Divvy for OSX. Divvy is also nice because if you press the hotkey multiple times, it cycles the application through each of your monitors. No need to ever use your mouse to move/resize a window ever again.

3) Fuzzy file search in your editor. You know you want to open src/components/user.js so you type "cu<enter>" and it appears.

Any tools like this that become so ingrained in your muscle memory that you just kind of think things ("move this window and then summon my terminal") and the computer responds.

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> 1) Any terminal that you can summon/dismiss with a global hotkey. Examples are Guake for Linux and iTerm2 for OSX. I consider this a must-have for all developers.

Years ago I saw someone using this (I think it was actually Yakuake) and ran it for a bit. I really didn't like that it was a single session. However, I later messed around with tiling window managers (which relates to your #2!) and having a shortcut to pop up a new terminal is really what I wanted this whole time.

Just to touch on #3, any time I'm writing a gui that's expected to have more than a handful of items I push to add a search bar with fuzzy matching at the top. Otherwise, search would get added after it's used for like a decade and everyone is immediately enthusiastic and grateful. All of the non-fuzzy solutions are too pedantic to use.

I'm not a fan of global/slideout terminals either. I typically have multiple tabs and multiple panes within each tab tiled on the right hand side of my monitor.

CMD+Tab is enough of a global hotkey for my needs, and it's usually only one or two tabs anyway.

It absolutely blows my mind how many developer-centric search UIs don’t have fuzzy search. Developer tools css editors for one (CSS! The language with margin-* naming conventions everywhere!). Also GitHub issue labels.

Browser history too.

I think the people who sell tools or buy tools usually constrain themselves to "least common denominator" type of experiences.

(This might be true of free/shared/common tools that haven't been configured yet)

But getting past all that, after a lot of craftsmanship and idea sharing, that's when tools start to ramp up in productivity.

I use emacs, because if something doesn't work like you want to, you can coerce it to do so. That said I personally wish it was python-based, because I'm more fluent in python than lisp.

when you summon the terminal do you first then need to `cd` into the directory you need?

What I assume the parent was talking about was the ability to literally just open a new terminal window with a keyboard shortcut (e.x. Mod-Enter in i3wm). If that's the case then yes.

While using i3, you can also place a terminal in the scratchpad, which works more similarly to Yakuake.

Yep. Looking at `history` it's often something like "ping" "top" "docker ps" "curl" which don't care about directory. Since it defaults to $HOME, that's generally good enough.

When I was working more seriously on things with project directories I had a couple aliases set up with a simple bookmark system. The "bookmarks" would be symlinks in a dot folder. I could type `g proj` or `g lib` to hop around.

I don't use iTerm2, but I have a global hide/show shortcut via Hammerspoon (https://github.com/cweagans/dotfiles/blob/90764db6146383a92e...). I could extend this to pretty much any app, but the only one I regularly need it for is my terminal.

I like this method a little more because it's not a single session, there's no animation, etc. It just pops into existence exactly how/where I left it, and then goes away again when I'm done with it.

> 3) Fuzzy file search in your editor

I’ve been using “fzf” [1] for file and directory search and I can’t recommend it enough.

It integrates nicely with vim [2] as well.

1. https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

2. https://youtu.be/qgG5Jhi_Els

What blows my mind is that fzf is insanely lightweight, I don't even know if it relies on external dependencies.

I wasn't aware iTerm2 supported this and now I'm very pleasantly surprised. It's not possible to overstate how thankful I am that you pointed this out.

> 1)

You don't need a separate terminal just for that. It's better to automate your window manager to open the terminal. I use this with tmux and i3:

  #!/usr/bin/env bash
  tmux new-window -t 0 -c "$1"
  i3-msg 'workspace 1' # switch to i3 workspace where my terminal is placed

I also use distinct hotkeys to specify which directory to cd to (the script above accepts a directory as argument).

Why is it "better"?

I rarely want to open a new window, I want a terminal that I never close, that stays in the background until I call it forward. And it has to be available on any workspace ("space" on macOS). Iterm does all of that perfectly

>2) Anything that lets you resize/place windows with hotkeys. For example, Divvy for OSX. Divvy is also nice because if you press the hotkey multiple times, it cycles the application through each of your monitors. No need to ever use your mouse to move/resize a window ever again.

Aquasnap is an OKish windows equivalent. The best i've found, at least.

Divvy works on Windows as well and is great.

> Any terminal that you can summon/dismiss with a global hotkey

Thanks! I didn't know I need this until I tried it!

what's the difference between 1 and "ctrl alt t" ?

So does Ctrl-Alt-f2 count?

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