The Road Coder's Survival Kit | Hacker News Reader

The Road Coder's Survival Kit

twilio.com

43 pointsRobSpectre27 comments

I was really hoping for stuff that makes you more effective at coding while on the road. I find my productivity takes a serious hit when I'm moved from my 27" monitor +12" laptop screen to just my laptop screen.

Any suggestions for this?

Having a virtual desktop manager helps a lot, along with keyboard shortcuts to switch between desktops comfortably. For Linux/Mac virtual desktops are built in and for Windows there's VirtaWin.

Truly - moving off my triple headed desktop to my X1 carbon is always jarring, especially with merging.

A few things that have helped me working with constrained real estate:

1) Terminal font choice - I switched to Inconsolata last year for my road laptop. Can drop font size to 10 and save serious column space without murdering your eyes.

2) High contrast syntax highlighting with light and dark themes - While I love Solarized on my desktop, glare can make it tough to read. I often switch to Tomorrow (http://chriskempson.github.io/base16/#tomorrow) dark or light depending on the conditions.

3) Buffer navigation plugins - The biggest productivity sink of the small, horizontal laptop screen is the reduced real estate for code. You end up spending way more time navigating up and down a file than on a bigger screen. As I use vim, I use EasyMotion (https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-easymotion) to make that navigation fast. Repeating the last motion in particular is super useful.

Hope that helps.

I know that your question is more about productivity/managing with less space, but at the very least, to make your life easier I recommend Stay for OS X.

If you go from a dual monitor setup to solo and back a lot, Stay will manage your windows and keep them in the same position (and crucially, the same size) when you plug your monitor back in.

https://itunes.apple.com/app/stay/id435410196

that's exactly why I hope the oculus rift takes off and offers some high res models suitable for that kind of work in the future.

I've always dug the idea of eventually having a high-res, oculus or something like it, with multiple virtual displays, (or more interestingly a paradigm for arranging and working with programs specifically designed for 3D).

I also like the idea of something like that, but with an AR approach. Map an AR virtual monitor to any flat surface or random space you want.

I'm sure there are way better things you can do with AR than just that (I just think it's a reasonable and useful naive first approach), so here's hoping someday soon :)

CastAR sounds like it might make a cool dev environment. Hang up the reflective material, put on the glasses, and you've got a screen. Doesn't block everything else out the way the Oculus does. http://technicalillusions.com/castar/

in my fantasy world I have a computer (a laptop or maybe just a processing unit of some sort) plus something like an oculus with many cameras on it .

When I am busy, I shut off the world and get distraction-free. When I want to interact with others I composite the real world atop my VR world from the cameras, without ever lifting the headset.

Ghost in the Shell but much simpler.

I currently do 100% of my work on a 17" laptop (and right now I'm hanging out in a small town in the Sierra, watching a river flow by right outside my window).

I'm not sure what you use, but I've found that just keeping a really organized workspace helps a lot. I use KDE4 and have four workspaces set up: one for web browser, one for tiled ssh terminals, one for Sublime, and one for "everything else". They're always arranged in the same order, and I have an easy hotkey (ctrl-alt-left or right arrow) to switch between them

Open question: what's the best "workspaces" solution for Windows 8? I've seen many and used a few, but each had certain drawbacks. Does anyone have a favorite?

mDesktop & windows 7 is tolerable. no idea how this fares against alternatives. otherwise xmonad when I don't have to use windows

You probably won't like this suggestion, but I think the effect you're experiencing is a mirage. I've spent a lot of time on 3-monitor setups and a lot of time on just a laptop screen and I think the number of screens ranked somewhere around #43 on a "List of things affecting my productivity."

As Adam Carolla jokes, if you use chapstick every day, then suddenly you notice that you can't live without chapstick. But, if you never use it, then you don't need it. A lot of things are like this, including, I think, multiple monitors. Go without them for a while and you'll find that they're really not necessary.

http://www.asus.com/Monitors_Projectors/MB168BPlus/ Something like this has been on my wishlist for quite some time personally. Maybe its what youre looking for?

Virtual desktops are a big help.

If you have the space, moving any reference querying over to a tablet (iPad, etc) is one trick I use. Actually, the biggest use for my iPad is as a reference book.

I tried that, but found the inability to copy/paste between the reference and my text editor was annoying...

I typically use sshfs to the VM for interpreted languages. Or fabric scripts to deploy source.

My solution has been to use much smaller fonts. That's the only way to fit the same amount of information on a smaller screen. My favorite font is ProggyTiny: http://geoff.greer.fm/2013/12/24/programming-fonts/

On my 11" Air, it gives me 225 columns and 65 rows of text in a terminal: http://geoff.greer.fm/images/Screen%20Shot%202014-01-05%20at...

Honestly? Do it more often.

At my last startup, we all worked from our laptops with no external monitors. I got used to it after a few weeks, and found myself able to work fine like that for 2 years.

When I switched jobs and finally had access to a huge apple cinema display, it felt way too big. What do I need all this space for? Of course, I got used to that after a couple weeks, and now I have a hard time coding when I'm away from it.

I've noticed the same thing when I travel with only my tiny chromebook (with crouton): the first week it seems painfully small, then it's normal. And when I go back to my 15" mbp, it seems unnecessarily large.

YMMV, but my experience has been that whatever I use for a week or two is fine for me.

Another part of it is what your software is designed for. I honestly think xcode 5 was designed for 27" 1440p displays. I was always frustrated with xcode on a 1080p display until I moved to a 1440p display with it.

Good point. I do almost all of my work in vim or a terminal, which maximize my text-editing space. I could see feeling cramped in an IDE with lots of side displays and menus.

I've seen portable laptop screens for sale for awhile now, but I've never tried one. I'm curious, though. Has anyone ever used something like these?

https://www.google.com/search?q=portable+laptop+screen

Of course it would add to the energy consumption (and probably the energy used by the laptop), but the advantage is it's light, and in a travel-convenient form factor.

I use my ipad as a second monitor occasionally, using air display. It works well to throw a browser up on and test. Or, even if you don't use air display, as long as you're okay with the mobile browser for the testing, you can set up a local network, and just navigate to the test address.

It's not ideal, but it's nice.

I find the size of my multiple monitor setup is less a concern than being able to mentally divide tasks/contexts. ymmv

If anyone is looking for pants that resist liquids, have good flex, travel well, and still have a fairly trendy cut to them, check out the Levi's commuter pants/gear [1]

I'm a bit of a trendy fop and I love them. The fabric has a bit of spandex in it, which makes them super comfortable and flexible. Even though they have the spandex, though, they also have a normal/natural sheen, so people will just think you're wearing regular slacks and not space pants.

They're made for cycling, and they also work pretty well for that, as well (which is really where the give of the spandex shines).

They run about $80 MSRP

If you want to spend an unhealthy chunk of dough, and get pants that are pretty much amazing, you should check out the Outlier OG's [2].

Again, they're designed for cycling, but they're made out of a straight up tech fabric called schoeller dryskin [3]. They're relatively water resistant and dry really quickly when they get wet. The fabric has a nice give to it, and is comfortable. Those would set you back about $180, though.

I'm a bit of a bike nerd, and do a lot of commuting by bike. Toured ireland for five or six weeks as well. I also like clothes with a good cut. I've found cycling clothes like that tend to offer a lot of functionality that makes them good travel attire and there are a number of companies out there making things with a good cut to them. Like I said, though, I'm into feeding my foppish vanity; If you're not, well, more power to you :)

[1] http://us.levi.com/family/index.jsp?categoryId=11844101 [2] http://shop.outlier.cc/shop/retail/new-og.html [3] http://www.schoeller-textiles.com/en/fabric-groups/soft-shel...

I really like packing cubes, they can have a compression effect. One of the eagle creek half cubes for example holds 3 shirts, 3 pairs of socks and 3 pieces of underwear for example.

God, those pants :O Please, fellow devs, dress better than that.

From my perspective having been on a pure road trip:

Pretty low-key for a functional not-quite-douchey-tacticool pair of pants. Pockets are of huge value when you carry your life with you on the road. Jeans are probably the next best bet if you need to look decent, but will feel bad in hot weather, not keep certain important areas dry, and lack the cargo capacity. Synthetic clothing helps a lot here. It dries very quickly and aireates better -- less trips to laundromat.

Comfort and function quickly took precedence on a half-year road trip I participated in. If you're trying to run cheap (car/forest camping for free, working in city by day), you want clothing that will not start stinking you up in under 3 days, and need certain items (phone, flashlight, pocket knife, etc.) quick at hand. If you are going to face clients/prospects, you keep a change of casual clothing fresh for just that purpose (and freshen up that day!). Granted, this is from a road-nomad perspective, but you get the idea.

These pants? http://www.prana.com/stretch-zion-pant.html?color=Charcoal

They really don't look that bad to me.

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