Enhancing Productivity on OSX (and some Linux) – Gateway Drugs – LaunchBar, hotkeys, valuing your own time

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Enhancing Productivity on OSX (and some Linux) – Gateway Drugs – LaunchBar, hotkeys, valuing your own time

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osx-productivity

Slides for a lunch-n-learn on being more productive, w/ an emphasis on OSX-based tools

On Github trosen-r7 / osx-productivity

Enhancing Productivity on OSX (and some Linux)

Outline

  • LaunchBar and Hotkeys
  • Getting Things Done™ (GTD)
  • Easier CLI
  • Pry
  • Turn websites into apps
  • Evernote is totally worth it

Gateway Drugs

LaunchBar, hotkeys, valuing your own time

You have to get use to things like this. Expect things like this. These make sense as interface idioms, and in order to get much out of the rest of this talk, you have to believe that you **should** be able to do things more efficiently. More than that, you have to believe that it's your right as a computer user to defend your time against wasteful interfaces.

LaunchBar

  • Launch apps
  • Switch apps
  • Load URLs
  • Create easy custom behaviors
  • DEMO: Open Firefox
  • DEMO: Google something
  • DEMO: Wikipedia search
  • DEMO: get to Pro Pull Requests
  • DEMO: get to Pro wiki
  • DEMO: Open a Redmine ticket

HotKeys

  • Re-map Caps Lock to Ctrl
  • Cmd-[Arrow] to jump to beginning/end of line
  • Emacs-ish hotkeys (Ctrl-A, Ctrl-E) work in many apps
  • Cmd-Tab to toggle between apps

Spotlight Search

  • Full-text indexing of tons of stuff
  • Even get previews from many apps
  • Never wonder where you put something again

Getting Things Done™

  • A book by David Allen
  • A way to capture and prioritize all of the little things you need to do
  • An excellent way to ensure your mind is spent thinking and not fretting about obligations
  • GTD's heart is the trusted system
  • GTD is about immediate capturing
  • There's a tempatation that you can do GTD w/ the web app, but I don't think so - no web app has an instant add functionality

You don't have to read the book

(Free flowcharts FTW)

  • Your brain is for thinking - not tracking
  • Only by capturing, organizing, and reviewing in an ongoing flow can you achieve sanity
  • The feeling that yes, you've captured it all is addicting

OmniFocus

No matter what you're doing, you should be able to add something new. "Capturing" and continuing with your work. [[DEMO]]

CLI Awesomesauce

  • iTerm 2
  • ZSH
  • Oh My Zsh!
  • ack not grep
  • Ctrl-r for your hands' sake

iTerm 2

  • Replacement for OS X Terminal
  • Split screens
  • Different "profiles" encapsulate settings
  • Visual bell

ZSH

Extending ZSH

  • ZSH gets you great prompt options as well as Ruby, RVM, Git, Rails integration etc
  • syntax highlighting is just awesome -- demo!

Ack Not Grep

  • Ack is usually what you want
  • Mac: 
    brew install ack
  • Linux: 
    apt-get install ack-grep
  • faster than grep b/c it does less
  • usually want to find strings in source code
  • highlighting for your search and line numbers by default

ctrl-r

  • Dude, your shell remembers your commands
  • zsh even filters it for you to help
  • Always surprised by how little this gets used by exp'd people
  • It remembers!

Pry!

For all the Ruby things

  • syntax highlighting
  • pagination of large data structures
  • ability to stop execution
  • ls - all local variables
  • wtf - show last exception
  • execute shell commands with '.'
  • help - gives you lots of info

Fluid

Turn websites into apps

  • stop looking for the tab you have PT in
  • treat common web pages like apps

Evernote

Totally worth the annual cost, kinda life-changing

  • Effortless organization of notes
  • track expenses
  • save web stuff
  • $45/year is a steal
  • Share things selectively if you need to
  • support for integrating multiple kinds of things together in one doc
  • Make annotated screenshots
  • OTR business cards
  • save anything and find it again