I just read Bram Moolenaar’s Seven habits of effective text editing I think his three basic steps are great:

1. While you are editing, keep an eye out for actions you repeat and/or spend quite a bit of time on.
2. Find out if there is an editor command that will do this action quicker. Read the documentation, ask a friend, or look at how others do this.
3. Train using the command. Do this until your fingers type it without thinking.

I imagine there is a similarly awesome checklist on how to optimize code. This post is a collection of some of the commands I use to speed up my workflow.

Emacs

Reload settings without restarting

After modifying emacs settings in ~/.emacs.d/ one can load these changings without restarting emacs with

M-x load-file ~/.emacs.d/init.el

This speeds up emacs customization dramatically.

Org Mode

Pull up this week’s agenda:

C-c a a

Switch to only tasks scheduled for today:

d

Clock in / clock out.

Finish.

---

How do I change when something is scheduled?

C-c C-s         org-schedule

How do I find tasks that haven’t been scheduled?

C-c a u

With an org file open use M-x describe-bindings to see shortcuts available. Here is a quick reference of bindings I think are important.

C-c $           org-archive-subtree
C-c C-w         org-refile

“A: urgent and important; B: of moderate urgency or importance; or C: pretty much optional…Use the , key to set your tasks’ priorities.”

Custom Views

C-c a c
M-x customize-option org-agenda-custom-commands

Python

Run a single test case

To speed up the edit-test-fix cycle, it is nice to run a single test with nose:

nosetests tests:TestUser

bash

Search command history quickly

Create ~/.inputrc and fill it with this:

"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
set completion-ignore-case on

This allows you to search through your history using the up and down arrows … i.e. type “cd /” and press the up arrow and you’ll search through everything in your history that starts with “cd /”.

Copied from Jude Robinson.

Search and replace over multiple files

find -name "AGG_STORE*.do" -print | xargs sed -i "s/use transactions_raw\([0-9]\).dta/insheet using transactions_raw\1.csv/g"
find -name "AGG_STORE*.do" -print | xargs sed -i "s/using transactions_raw/using ..\/..\/csvs\/transactions_raw/g"
find -name "AGG_STORE*.do" -print | xargs sed -i "/! gunzip transactions_raw[0-9].dta.gz;/d" AGG_STORE1.do | more

Mount samba share

sudo mount -t smbfs //research/amarder /media/research -o username=amarder,uid=1000

Git

I forked a Git repository, edits were made to the original repo, how do I merge those edits into my fork? Check out stackoverflow.