> But I still used the up/down arrow keys for years or scrolled up when I was looking for a previous command

It's not even that bad of a habit with zsh either where it will only scroll through history matching a substring in your history, for instance if I type "rg -i" and then start pressing up arrow, it will only cycle through history entries starting with "rg -i".

I was my most effective when I had a bunch of cheat sheets taped up in my workspace.

It's quite true. Years ago, after `git switch` was released, I wanted to try to switch from `git checkout` to `git switch`. Ultimately I had to set up some bash nastiness to error and "scold" me when I typed `git checkout` from memory, while still allowing shell scripts to call `git checkout` just fine. It was a fun exercise, and at least now I know how I could do it again: https://github.com/lelandbatey/dotfiles/blob/99c08f81fc89710...

https://atuin.sh/

atuin kind of fixes this habit, when you click up you get a list of the latest commands, and you can just start typing to search. It's extremely natural.

Usually what I do is writing these tricks down to a document that is easily accessible at a place where I know that I will look for when failing to remember them.

People had this same problem last century. They would use templates that fit over their keyboards with all the common shortcuts and commands printed on them. Sometimes they were for a specific program, but you could buy blank ones to write your own notes.

Today, "keyboard templates" have an entirely different meaning, so the best thing for this is paper. Print your shortcuts out on a piece of paper and put it near your monitor. You could even categorize them by writing them on different-colored Post-Its.

Maybe, but there's all sorts of habits and skills that would make us enormously more productive/healthy/etc. if only the masses would learn them. This is a very old problem.

> “the old days”

Is this just plain old rage baiting? I literally can’t tell any more.

There are several keyboard shortcuts that you would never find out from watching an agent, but are mindblowing to new Linux users. I suck at remembering vim keybindings, but I have ingrained ctrl+a ctrl+e for jumping to the start/end of a string (which also works all over OS X). I had been a developer for an embarassing amount of time before I discovered those.

There are other terminal specific shortcuts for removing last word (ctrl+w) but they don't seem to be as portable.

This is interesting, I also do this, it will not let me remember the commands, but, I will learn what is possible and roughly how. And in this day and age that is more important. Just like stamping knowledge into your head also became less important (but not 0 important) with books and the internet.

> go back to the old days where you manually approve every command the AI runs

Those are also the current days if you have any sense. It's a bad idea to run an LLM with access to your machine at all, but if you absolutely must, you better review everything it does to make sure it doesn't run anything insane.

This is a neat and useful trick, and I will be borrowing it. Thanks!

After 24 years and it is still useful. I would add Sed and Awk books as well.

I think that "everyday" would be a stretch, but i dont understand why youd think thats annoying, someone took the time to consider helping the rest of the engineering team grow, by posting something useful.

I frequently do the same, but not everyday; only when i think its something actually useful/helpful beyond the everyday crap. Most recently, we have had a huge push to use ai (just like everywhere else), ive been getting pretty creative with it, and at this point have a well polished setup that i can give a shitty sentence on a problem, not only does it understand the task, but theres a full ticket->branch->work->pr review->ready comment flow that it uses. My team also uses ai but they havent quite wrapped their head on ways to really work with it. I have built and shared a number of helpful things with the team to try and help them grow. One such thing was a doc i had my ai instance write, based on how ive been using my setup. This alone has started to get the rest of the team up to where i am.

My team doesnt share the same types of things i do, but they still share helpful things.

Call it what you will; I think if youre not helping your team grow by providing insights and helpful things, then youre not the kind of person i want to work with.

I think I would prefer an optional separate channel specifically for people to share such things with each other who wanted to see that exact sorta thing. Then nobody gets bothered by it who's not interested in such things, and people who are have a place that's dedicated to exactly that.

s/seen as//

Annoyance is a clue; not about them, but about you.

Is it much more powerful, than pushd?

I go a step further. When I press Alt + j, it sends all the directories in zoxide to fzf (in order of frequency), and I quickly choose the directory and jump to it.

I rarely type "cd" anymore. A huge quality of life improvement!

yes! zoxide is also probably my most used tool. I did not map it to cd yet, but I use the z command to jump into directories indexed by zoxide.

Yes, but how do I know what should go in the justfile? When I've realized I've used Ctrl-r for the same thing a few times :-)

And as another commenter said, you often forget the target, and use Ctrl-r to find it. Although just does support fzf...

I do that too. I am trying to use Mise. (Getting interested in Maak. Haven't done anything with it yet. My Scheme is pretty rusty)

Still, Zsh history with fzf fuzzy searching is fantastic. I have years of history I can recall commands with a few keystrokes.

Truly a second-brain.

Ctrl + R is great, you don't have to type out --dangerously-skip-permissions

Ctrl+r is great, sometimes. History saving sucks which can make using it difficult, but i usually use it out of laziness than trying to recall a command, especially with ssh or repeated iterations requiring flipping between two settings/states. Its hard to rely on it for other things, but its still super useful.

I’m lazy so With fish, I just type a part of the command and press up few times to get to where I want. There’s also fish-fzf.

ctrl+r still great for targeting your make targets :)

>if you share stuff everybody knows you risk coming off as arrogant

I have always felt like my bar for publishing something (even just to internal wikis/channels) is too high due to being overly self-conscious. I think we should try not to validate that feeling by implying that there is a non-negligible number of readers who will think you have a personality flaw because you wrote down your personal collection of tips in a public place, or that those people deserve consideration in the first place.

There is no such thing as "the things everybody knows". There are just too many things. Even a list of basic tips is probably going to contain one thing I didn't know or perhaps forgot. Write-ups like this are where most of my practical knowledge comes from, not RTFM (which I do).

I'm struggling to comprehend how branches can be avoided (or why one would want to, as they are the cornerstone of programming). I can only think how to obfuscate them, which is rarely useful.

A (hopefully interesting) aside about avoiding branches is if you don't need an exact answer but need your code to make a decision based on an approximation over some known range, you can employ a basic fuzzy logic method. Serially add, subtract, or multiply to adjust a value by a handful of weighted inputs then use that value instead of branching repeatedly to choose the right action. You might branch once based on the final value where it would have otherwise been a larger tree of decisions. In fortuitous situations, you may avoid branching altogether.

In what context can you avoid branches?

if you share stuff everybody knows you risk coming off as arrogant.

Or stupid, like all those vloggers posting "ZOMG! Go all in with these secret hidden weird trick iPhone life hacks to level up!" that are just regurgitating what's in the manual.

As we used to say, RTFM: https://support.apple.com/en-us/docs/iphone

Going from ag to ripgrep is not unequivocally better. Sure ripgrep is faster, but its file filtering using -g is so much more cumbersome than -G in ag. The latter uses a regex and the former uses glob. I type many more characters to do the same search, and the same search is maybe 0.1s faster for a medium codebase. So no for me. Maybe it’s worth it for a larger codebase that isn’t large enough to require indexing.

I doubt you need a full script or skill for that. I would try something like this straight in Claude Code (and will as soon as my 5 hour quota resets :-): Review this page: https://will-keleher.com/posts/small-programming-tricks-matt... Then, review my shell init scripts (both bash and fish) and shell history. Make recommendations based on the tips and tricks from the page.

I think it's a great way to stop understanding what's going on in your terminal.

IMHO the value of these nuggets is that you understand what you're doing and why; opening yourself to large amounts of non-default behavior likely will end up in a less than pleasant setup.

Not taking into account that different users might disagree on what is convenient and what is not, which is basically the point of making things configurable.

While AI has made my life as a developer worse in many, many ways, I am conversely really glad the conversation has shifted past these types of tricks, framework wars, etc.

> `find` does a lot more things than that.

And I don't think that's a good thing. Especially because AI coding agents use it a lot. They only need to hallucinate a little to destroy your filesystem.

It is just a query language for the filesystem, which is what "finding" means.

It's essentially like the SQL SELECT expression.

Definitely. The whole Unix philosophy of each command doing one thing and being easily composable always seemed to break down in my mind when it came to find. find does a lot.

similar to ripgrep, though, fd is a modern replacement that’s a bit friendlier to use.

I wrote this about git log -S and other Git tools for code archaeology and debugging: https://lucasoshiro.github.io/posts-en/2023-02-13-git-debug/

You can see the discussion about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39877637

I do hand-code for the most part. I will use LLMs as a "smart reference" when I can't recall how to do something or maybe to scaffold out a starting point if I'm working in a less familiar language or framework. I use them as a better search engine, where I would have probably have looked at Stack Overflow, mdn, or online docs in the past.

I'm fortunate I guess in that most of my work tasks have very loosely defined deadlines, if any at all.

> To what extent are people still coding by hand these days?

I write everything myself. After 41 years of coding, I think in code — code flows from my brain through my fingers effortlessly: translating my thoughts to English for an LLM to then translate back to code is much, much slower than me. And once my hyperfocus kicks in, the last thing I need is to be jolted out of it by an LLM prompting loop.

JetBrains Rider has an AI auto-complete which I do use for the 5-10% of the time that it can predict what I’m going to write next. But even the next-word/next-block-of-code prediction seems so hopelessly out of its depth (which is supposed to be LLM’s party piece), it’s genuinely shocking how wrong it is most of the time.

Disclaimer: I’m not writing vanilla line-of-business code or bog standard web apps, so I suspect I’m just not in the training data.

Also in academia but I'm old and my real work is done withy students. I'm coding by hand much less than I used to (boo) but solving more problems with code myself than I used to (yay). Having an llm do things turns out to be similar to having a student do them but with fast turnaround and it's fine to have them work on your home automation system. ;)

I still hand code backends and frontends. I also review code by reading it manually, and ideally running it and then screenshot'ing receipts of it working and attaching those in my PR approval.

I hand code entirely at work still, while almost all of my colleagues do not and I am still able to keep up. I do use coding agents on personal projects, but have not felt the impetus to switch to agent based coding at work.

I don’t mean this to brag, mostly to point out that in my line of work, actually writing the code is not the biggest bottleneck.

For context I work on greenfield network security appliances

While I mostly just do AI-assisted coding at work nowadays, after a long time yesterday I did some scripting in a python REPL on a remote server which didn't have any AI tooling. It felt rewarding. I was also surprised my programming muscle memory was still alive and kicking.

I write code by hand because LLMs do not provide any significant productivity gains. They turn out code fast, but then I have to review it to make sure the code is correct. That takes me about as long as it would to write the code myself in the first place, so I continue to write the code myself.

My coding by hand is always exploratory. Either I’m getting familiar with a new library/platform or I’m sizing up the architecture of the software. Then it’s a heavy dose of copy/pasting, snippets, and emacs-fu. What I spend most time on is reading docs. Apart from that, it’s thinking (mostly away from the computer).

> To what extent are people still coding by hand these days?

That's basically I all do. I might ask a few questions to LLMs here and there like Google/StackOverflow in the days of yore.

Still, every line in all my codebases are still hand-typed. I get everything I need out of the chatbots, and I cannot use any kind of agentic coding tools at work, oddly enough. Trust me, I'd love to have access to something like Codex at work. That way I could save my mental bandwidth for personal projects that I find interesting and enjoying.

Im not TYPING a lot of code by hand anymore (still some, inference is slower than typing in a few cases) but im still in the shell zipping around doing other stuff like i always have, the LLM is helpful in a lot of ways but it in no way shape or form is the ideal way to interact with a computer.

So i still get daily use out of these tricks.

Are there people that are literally ONLY interacting with a computer via an LLM? thats crazy if its true

People in academia generally doesn't code much. So I am not surprised.

LLM's have not affected us in the slightest when it comes to coding. Maybe we write a snippet, post it for llm to scrutinize, and usually LLMs spout bullshit and wrong suggestions and after enough verbal abuse it points to some issues with the code.

But I don't get this delegation to LLM's for your entire coding. I hope everyone delegates to LLM :) (sarcasm)

Can you explain that one (the logarithm trick)? I have no idea what it's trying do to. Is it saying that it's convenient or useful to know the order of magnitude of a number rather than its value?

I have the same feeling, there are new approaches and tricks to get things done, mainly from how to work with AI more efficiently. But the human brain still needs to be trained and learn new things to not get rotted

Using a computer is irrelevant in the age of AI, you should stop doing that.