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Comment by namuol | Hacker News Reader

Seeing a lot of “fiddly” software being listed here. Stuff that lets you configure and tune a workflow endlessly. It’s ironic that this is the sort of thing most of us will think of, since it doesn’t really account for time saved so much as time spent fiddling…

Keeping an eye out for software that you barely use, as this is the kind with the most potential to truly save me time.

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Reminds me of a co-worker who would spend between 3-5 hours a day messing with their vim config. I know we cannot actually write code for 8 hours a day, heck a 3-4 hour session can feel too long. But spending 15+ hours a week endlessly fiddling with their tools was hilarious to watch on some level. I remember at team lunches how they would go on and on about this new plugin they found that is going to save them so much time now. Oh the irony if they only stepped back for a moment...

Yeah I know I’d fall in this trap if I let myself customize my tools so use everything with default config. No custom keyboard layouts, no shell aliases, nothing. It has the advantage of portability as well.

From that perspective, using Ctrl+R and Ctrl+S for reverse-i-search in a shell saves me so much time from writing commands especially big Kubernetes ones.

Cmd/Ctrl-F in general is probably the biggest invisible time-saver if you can count UX patterns.

The 'history' command is helpful the 1% of the time Ctrl-R and Ctrl-S fail you.

Bash alias. And my large bash_alias file

Try fzf for history management, it's a life changer.

Add fzf to get fuzzy search for your history. I reuse long complicated commands all the time by pressing Ctrl+R and then typing the first letters of a few words I remember using.

https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

It's also useful to remove duplicate commands and store infinite history. Add this to ~/.bashrc:

  export HISTFILESIZE=
  export HISTSIZE=
  export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups

Changing HISTFILE by context has been a huge win, keeping commands from generic system administration or different projects from getting in the way as I search back through my history to do a thing again.

You can also add a comment for searchability, as in:

    > big hairy command with --lots --of arguments  # foobar

Then you can search for 'foobar' via fzf or whatnot.

Give hstr a try: https://github.com/dvorka/hstr

It's saved me countless hours over the years as it's just so much better than regular CTRL-R. I also find it to work better than fzf.

ActivityWatch. Records your activity in the background (how much time spent in which programs and the time period). It can record browser tab titles and vs code open files, sometimes it can be invaluable to go back and check out what i did at a specific point in time.

Sorry mate but that is just wrong. I get payback of a hundred to one on most of my fiddly bits.

A single command that does the ten things needed correctly every time instead of looking up each thing, typing it wrong four times and doing it again is a godsend. Lots of time saved. More accurate and reliable as well.

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