Other Tools for Saving Time
In Atom
This post is part a series I have put together on saving time increasing productivity, click the links above to check out my other posts.
If you have checked out my other posts and hung around until now… congrat, if you are coming at this point ‘hi’.
Hopefully by now you can fly around your machine at lightning speeds with nothing but a few key strokes and I haven’t made an exhaustive list just the ones I have found most useful and save me the most time. There are a number of other tools that can save you a lot of time and reduce bugs and errors.
- Auto-close packages — (e.g. atom-ternjs for JavaScript, autoclose-HTML for HTML) These will automatic place the closing tag or bracket after you finish the first half with ‘return’ or ‘tab’. This saves time and stops you from forget to put them in, which is less time spent searching for where that unexpected token should/shouldn’t be.
- Blanket packages — By this I mean packages that allow you to affect change on large amounts of your code at once. E.g. multi-cursor — this package allows you to expand your cursor over many lines; this is handy as you can indent a chunk of code to the same level in one go. Another handy package is file-icon — the benefit of this might be hidden but this package gives a different icon for each file type allow you to quickly tell the difference between the ‘index.html’ and ‘index.css’ files without having to look at the file extension.
- Snippets — This is a core atom package and I highly recommend them because there is always that one thing you have to keep typing out, an example for me is react components. After having written out far too many I made a snippet (and it is shown below) and now rather than typing out the whole component every time, all I do is type ‘sm’ then ‘tab’ and the snippet is deployed; as a bonus you can also put tab points in them (this is the ‘$1’) and if they contain the same number you can write on multiple line simultaneously.
This snippet file can be accessed from the File menu in atom and snippets are written in CSON and briefly the layout is as follows:-
a. The source language (e.g. JS, HTML).
b. The name of your snippet.
c. What you want to type to access it.
d. The what you want to appear on using the snippet.
I’ll update this list as I continue to develop and if there any great shortcuts you think I should include drop me a comment.
