General tips

The best general tip that I have is to identify where you would gain the most time using shortcuts. To illustrate, here’s a contrived example: suppose you never knew about copy/paste and found yourself frequently duplicating text manually. Learning about copy/paste would likely be by far the biggest time-saver you could incorporate into your workflow.

As the example shows, this process can be broken down into two phases: discovery and incorporation:

• Discovery: it’s difficult to use something if you don’t know it even exists! I suggest hunting through menus or keybindings files/settings to figure out which commands are even available to you. I’ve found some interesting ones from time to time. For example, in Sublime, you can select a bunch of lines and prune out duplicate values using Edit → Permute Lines → Unique. I wouldn’t have known that I could even do this unless I was searching through menus for it. Some ways to help you with this:
  • Try to analyze where you’re spending most of your time. For example, if you find yourself deleting entire lines multiple times per day, perhaps you could write in a note somewhere “find a hotkey for deleting lines”.
  • Try ditching your mouse for a day (or at least drastically reduce your usage). This will force you to find a keyboard-based solution for what you’re trying to accomplish.
  • Find resources like CheatSheet that list a bunch of shortcuts.
• Incorporation: now that you know something like Permute Lines exists, you need to actually start using it! For certain shortcuts like commenting code, it will be obvious (“instead of typing // here, I’ll press the comment shortcut”), but for others, you may need to be more mindful. I find it helpful to write it on my TODO list or a sticky note for a day to try finding a place for a particular shortcut.

As for why any of this is important, it’s simple: context-switching can kill your productivity. The less time you spend going from “what am I doing?” to “how do I do it?”, the less chance you have to lose focus.

Regarding the mouse: it’s not like using your mouse is bad, it’s just probably not the best. For that reason, I’ve always used 10+-button mice. My current one is a Logitech G600 and it has 12 thumb buttons. I did a short video on this specifically for this post.

Windows tips 

Note: I’m writing this for Windows 10. There’s a full list of keyboard shortcuts here.

• Keyboard shortcuts (“win” means “the Windows key” on your keyboard, and the “→” is used to indicate multiple hotkeys must be used in succession)
  • Win+# (e.g. win+1): navigate to that numbered icon on your taskbar. For example, in this picture of my taskbar from earlier, I have Chrome, then Explorer, then Visual Studio Code in my taskbar. That means that win+1 will activate Chrome, win+2 Explorer, and win+3 VSCode.
    • If you have multiple windows open of the same application, holding the Windows key and pressing the corresponding # multiple times will cycle through the Windows. E.g. win+1, win+1 will get to my second Chrome window.
  • Win+left or win+right: snap the focused window to the side of the screen. You can just keep pressing these to move them to different monitors, but win+shift+left and win+shift+right are better shortcuts for that.
  • Win+up: maximize the current window.
  • Win+T: set the focus to the taskbar. Because I stream, I don’t like using alt+tab since it shows previews of windows even from my second monitor and I’m worried I’ll leak information. Instead, to get to the final icon in the taskbar, I press win+T → end → enter.
  • Win+E: open a new Explorer window.
  • Win+period or win+semicolon: this brings up the emoji menu, which I use all the time. From there, just type something like “tada” and press enter: 🎉
  • While in most programs with an address bar: alt+D will bring you to your address bar.
  • When in a common file dialog (i.e. the “save” or “open” dialogs like this one), alt+T → alt+N will set the focus to the name/path section. You may think that only alt+N is needed, but if the focus is in the address bar at the top, then alt+N does not work.
  • Anything with a Quick Access Toolbar (i.e. all Office products or Explorer itself):
    • Right-click any shortcut in the ribbon and choose “Add to Quick Access Toolbar”
    • From there, you’ll see an icon appear in the upper left. Just like with win+#, now alt+# will activate that shortcut, where “#” is the index of the icon. For example, in this picture, alt+2 will make a new folder.
  • Text editing shortcuts like ctrl+backspace and ctrl+delete to delete the last/next word all at once.
• Mouse shortcuts
  • Double-clicking a word in almost any program will select the whole word.
  • A double-click followed by dragging the cursor around will select entire words rather than individual characters (try it now to select a bunch of words in this bullet point!).
  • Triple-clicking text in almost any program will select the entire line.
  • A triple-click followed by dragging the cursor around will select entire lines.
• Console tips
  • In CMD, Doskey can be used for aliases, but I had some issue with it years ago that caused me never to look into it again. Instead, I just make .cmd  files in my %userprofile%  and run those. For example, I like the alias s  for opening my text editor, so I make %userprofile%\s.cmd  with these contents:

    • @echo off
      set vsc="C:\Program Files\Microsoft VS Code\Code.exe"
      start "" %vsc% %*

    • After that, I can type something like s new_file.js to make a file in VSC.
  • ConEmu is a great tabbed console emulator that lets you assign a global shortcut to your terminal. I use the shortcut so that I can access my console from anywhere in the operating system.
• AutoHotkey
  • AutoHotkey lets you trigger commands either by typing arbitrary text (e.g. I can type `vsc  and it will turn into Visual Studio Code) or by pressing a keyboard shortcut. I uploaded my own AHK scripts here for reference. You can use this to fix typos that you make frequently, position windows in a particular way, format text, or really anything else that you would do yourself with a mouse and keyboard.

Text editor shortcuts 

Notes:

• I don’t use VIM keybindings.
• I’m not listing the actual keypresses needed to activate these since they’re not necessarily specific to a particular editor. Even if they were, I customize my shortcuts so that they’re not the defaults. To find out what these are for you, you should be able to search through your text editor’s list of shortcuts.
• I am going to list the name of the shortcut in parentheses that Visual Studio Code assigns, that way if it’s not obvious what my description refers to, you can at least try it out in VSC! Some of these may come from an extension, in which case the shortcut is a link to the extension.
• I’m not going to include “obvious” ones like “copy and paste”, “go to the next tab”, or “comment code”.
• I wrote blog posts about specific extensions and shortcuts for Sublime here and Visual Studio Code here.
• Here’s a video from 2015 of me using many of these shortcuts and some extra features in Sublime.

Most used functions:

• Multiple cursor management: these are all supremely useful for so many scenarios while developing that it’s hard to give a single example. Essentially, any time you find yourself wanting to use the find/replace dialogs, possibly with complex regex, you can probably do whatever you’re trying to do more easily with multiple cursors.
  • Select next instance of word (editor.action.addSelectionToNextFindMatch)
  • Ignore current instance of word (editor.action.moveSelectionToNextFindMatch)
  • Select all instances of word (editor.action.selectHighlights)
  • Extend line up or down (editor.action.insertCursorAbove)
• Duplicate selection or entire line (editor.action.copyLinesDownAction)
• Move entire lines up or down (editor.action.moveLinesUpAction): this is great for moving code into and out of block statements or just rearranging your code.
• Quickly open a file (workbench.action.quickOpen)
• Quickly navigate to a function (workbench.action.gotoSymbol)
• Soft undo (cursorUndo): suppose you’re trying to use multiple cursors to select the next three instances of the word “hello”, but you accidentally select the next four instances. Some people would press escape and then try again, but with soft undo, you can simply undo the last cursor.
• Close all windows to the right (workbench.action.closeEditorsToTheRight): useful when you have lots of temporary buffers open. I frequently find myself also using this in combination with the Windows shortcut alt+N for choosing “Don‘t save” when the dialog pops up.
• Toggle words (extension.toggle): as mentioned in both the Sublime and VSCode blog posts, this is the best extension that you never realized you wanted. It can convert true to false , ==  to !=, and whatever other pairs you may want (width/height, up/down, Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday/etc.).

Closing

I shared what I thought may be important, but you may have come into this post expecting something else. I’d love to hear how I can make this post better! Feel free to share feedback with me on Discord.

Introduction

I imagine most people will find this from my stream with a particular section already in mind, in which case use the links below. If you didn’t come from the stream, I’d love to have you there! I code for 8 hours on most weekdays on a game called Bot Land. You should try it! 😉

Quick links to parts of this post:

• Switching from Sublime
• Extensions that I use
  • Favorites
  • Useful extensions
  • Extensions for Sublime parity
• Settings
• Conclusion

Switching from Sublime 

I switched from Sublime to Visual Studio Code (VSC) on September 12th, 2018. I’d been using Sublime for about eight years. I was efficient and [mostly] happy with it. Those are the two qualities that you should want out of any editor in my opinion, so I’m not here to convince you to switch if you’re comfortable with what you’re using. My personal reasons for switching are:

• VSC is more actively maintained than Sublime.
• VSC is open source. At the very least, this means that if there are any core problems with the program, I could modify it myself instead of having to wait for another person to do it.
• VSC is completely free, i.e. not even nagware. I’d already purchased Sublime a long time ago, so the reason this matters to me is not actually due to the price itself, but because I like being able to suggest my toolset to other people, and a free tool is much easier to convince someone to use than a [potentially] paid tool.
• VSC seems to be more customizable than Sublime.
• VSC does more out of the box than Sublime (e.g. Git integration, formatting code).

The catalyst for the switch was my frustration with specific plug-ins for Sublime. For example, a long time ago, the syntax highlighter I used was broken in such a way that a file containing a specific set of characters would crash all of Sublime. More recently, my ESLint plug-in wasn’t aware of nested configurations, so it was reporting almost every file as being erroneous. These sorts of problems really cut into development time.

Switching to VSC was no easy task. Using an editor for eight years, you start to get used to seemingly inconsequential quirks. The total transition time for me was somewhere between 10 and 20 hours, and there are still things that I haven’t customized to my liking yet.

My blog post on Sublime still resides here.

My OneNote notes on VSC are here.

Extensions that I use 

This list only contains extensions that I felt were general enough to recommend. For example, I use this extension for AutoHotkey language support, but it’s kind of obvious that you’d want something like that if you find yourself modifying AHK files, so I’ll omit those from the list.

Each extension name is a link to its official page.

My favorite extensions 

Toggler

This is the holy grail of extensions that you don’t even realize you need until you try it. You specify arrays of transformations, and with a keyboard shortcut, you can switch between them. Common examples include converting true  to false  or !=  to == . It maintains case (e.g. True  → False , TRUE → FALSE) and works on multiple selections.

You can even cycle between multiple values. For example, I update the !today  command in my stream every day, so I use Toggler to change “Monday” to “Tuesday”, “Tuesday” to “Wednesday”, etc.

VSCode Eval

This evaluates JavaScript expressions. Most commonly, I find myself using this for mathematical operations. For example, suppose you have this code:

int life = 20;
int damage = 50;

…and suppose you want to multiply each value by 15. I would make multiple cursors, add in * 15 , then run VSCode Eval on the selections, resulting in:

int life = 300;
int damage = 750;

Since it’s just evaluating JavaScript expressions, you can do things like:

• Generate a repeated string: ‘*’.repeat(80)
• Use any Math.*  functions: cos(PI * 2)

TODO+

This lets you write/manage a TODO list directly in VSC:

I use this all the time for notes about whatever task I’m working on. These notes almost always convert into Git commits, as opposed to, say, code documentation (which doesn’t belong in a TODO list).

I ran into a performance issue with the extension that was solved by modifying this setting: “todo.statistics.project.enabled”: “false”

I also had to tweak the colors a bit (see the overview here), e.g. “todo.colors.done”: “#75715e”

Code Ace Jumper

This is like EasyMotion for Sublime (or VIM). You invoke Ace Jumper and type a single character, and all instances of that character will be annotated with another character that lets you quickly navigate to exactly the one that you want.

If you’re primarily a keyboard user and find yourself wanting to jump to arbitrary characters on the screen, then this is the extension for you.

Useful extensions 

• Bracket Pair Colorizer: if you’re lost in a sea of parentheses, braces, and brackets, this can help you reorient yourself. It assigns a color to each pair of opening/closing characters.
• indent-rainbow: similar to Bracket Pair Colorizer, this is great if you’re confused about what indentation level you’re at; it will highlight the indentation levels with different colors.
• GitHub Pull Requests: this lets you view pull requests from GitHub directly in VSC. At the time of writing (9/22/18), there are many actions that redirect you to GitHub, but it’s still helpful.
• GitLens: to be honest, I’m not totally sure what this adds over vanilla VSC because I only ever tried VSC with this installed, but everyone seems to love this extension. I definitely do use the File History Explorer for showing the changes to a single file.
• Multiple cursor case preserve: you have a line of code like int someWidth = width;  and you want to change “width” to “height” in both instances using multiple cursors. With this extension, you don’t have to worry about their casing. However, keep in mind that this particular example is better solved by Toggler since you wouldn’t even have to type “height” at all!
• One Dark Pro: the color theme I use is Atom One Dark Vivid.
• Rewrap: wraps comments to a given line length. This is nice if you use a ruler like I do to keep your lines to X characters long (this is controlled by the editor.rulers  array in your settings).
• Settings Sync: this lets you upload/download all of your settings, extensions, keyboard shortcuts, etc. all at once via GitHub gists.

Extensions I installed for Sublime parity 

These are extensions that provided functionality that I was used to in Sublime. If you’ve never used Sublime, I’d still recommend Bookmarks and expand-region.

• Bookmarks: add a bookmark to different points of interest in a file so that you can quickly jump to them.
• Center Editor Window: centers the editor window on the cursor.
• Dumb copy-paste: ctrl+shift+V from Sublime, i.e. pastes code with whatever the source indentation was.
• expand-region: ctrl+shift+space (“expand_selection”) from Sublime – expands the selection outward in scope.
• Incremental Search: almost like ctrl+I from Sublime, except not exactly… I want the search term to go into the ctrl+F buffer so that I can use “Find Next” with my incremental search. I haven’t found an extension to replicate the behavior exactly yet.
• Transformer: sort or reverse lines, or make the selected lines unique.
• transpose: ctrl+T from Sublime – transposes characters around the cursor, e.g. converting “tihs” → “this”. I would also like to transpose words, but I haven’t found an extension for that.

Settings 

Here’s a dump of most of my settings from October 2nd, 2019. I think that most settings are so opinionated that it isn’t worth highlighting any or explaining how to set them; there are enough resources for that sort of thing online already.

I don’t plan on keeping that list updated. This entire section is only here because people have already specifically asked for it.

Conclusion 

I touched on this earlier: the straw that broke the camel’s back with Sublime was the ESLint plug-in that I was using, but I wasn’t exactly unhappy with Sublime to begin with. So while I’m moderately happy with VSC after two weeks of using it, I feel like the real value is going to be difficult to discern—there are issues that I would have had with Sublime if I’d kept using it, but I’ll never know what those are since I’ve made the switch already.

With that said, I have several gripes with VSC:

• After hours of researching, I still have no idea how to smoothly use Git on Windows without having to type my password every time. I concocted such a ridiculous solution (read “Git setup”) that it annoys me just thinking about it.
• The sidebar and panel desperately need an autoclose option. VTools had two quirks (that aren’t worth going into) that prevented it from being a viable option for me.
• I’m missing minor functionality from several plug-ins: transposing words, highlighting TODO+ in exactly the way that PlainTasks did, diffing arbitrary text, etc.

Microsoft seems to release frequent updates to VSC, so I’m hopeful that the positives outweigh the negatives in the long run.

Background

I stream development on Twitch, which means people see almost everything I do on a computer for about 8 hours a day. I’ve gotten so many comments/questions about how I keep my notes organized that I wanted to share the tips that I’ve learned over the years.

As for why you should care about any of this: my philosophy is that taking notes allows you to apply your mental resources to more important areas. By writing notes, you will also solidify the concept in your brain (sometimes you’ll even clarify misunderstandings while writing them!). By organizing notes well, you’ll have this knowledge accessible to you and anyone you share them with for years to come.

This post does not focus on picking which note-taking software to use. I chose OneNote because it’s free, it syncs via the cloud, and it’s available on every platform I use. Those requirements may not be important for you; if you’ve already got another piece of software in mind, then skip the Specific tips section.

General tips

These tips apply to any software, not just OneNote.

Do as much or as little as you can

You likely don’t have a need to take notes for everything. I used to track my workouts in my notes (how far I ran, how long it would take, how much I lifted, etc.), but I never ended up using those notes for anything. I’ve since stopped taking them and I haven’t looked back.

In my opinion, the two properties that make for the best note-writing candidates are:

• Knowledge that will probably never change (e.g. recipes, how to conjugate French verbs)
• Knowledge that you may take you a while to re-learn (e.g. how to set up a virtual machine)

Specific categories or notes

Some people ask me for how I organize categories of notes (presumably so that they can get some ideas for starting out). OneNote has notebooks, categories, and notes, but the concept of hierarchies isn’t specific to OneNote, which is why this is in the General section of this post. Here is a list of highlights from my hierarchy:

• [Notebook] Personal – these are things that will likely never be shared with anyone
  • [Category] TODO
    • [Note] TODO: things I have to do in my life
    • [Note] ToBuy: products that I may be interested in buying at some point
• [Notebook] Knowledge – these are sets of notes that I may eventually share with other people
  • [Category] Coding – notes about a specific programming language
    • [Note] Python
    • [Note] JavaScript
  • [Category] Programs – notes about specific programs that are downloaded
    • [Note] Sublime
    • [Note] FLStudio
  • [Category] Websites – notes about specific software/sites which aren’t downloaded
    • [Note] GitHub
    • [Note] CodeSandbox
  • [Cateogry] French
• [Notebook] Work – work-specific notes, e.g. TODO, long-term TODO, meeting notes, etc. I suggest making one for each job that you have.
• [Notebook] Private – this is password-protected and contains only sensitive information.
  • [Note] Health – I keep track of my health history. When you’re changing doctors or you’re at urgent care and have to remember when you had a certain surgery or what a particular doctor recommended, this is really useful.
  • [Note] Employment history – I track dates of employment, bosses’ names, company addresses, etc. This massively saves time when applying somewhere or filling out government forms.
  • [Note] Residential history – just like above, sometimes you’ll fill out a government form that asks where you’ve lived for the last 7 years, so I recommend tracking addresses, dates of move-in and move-out, and contact information.
  • [Note] Life – We gain so much wisdom throughout our lives that we end up forgetting. I keep track of things I’ve learned here like solving interpersonal problems, handling feedback (both giving and taking), dealing with anger, preventing myself from getting back pain, etc.

My biggest suggestions from the large list above: make at least a Knowledge notebook, and try to make the same four private notes that I did when you find yourself needing them.

Organizing a new note

Originally, I used to just produce a gigantic bulleted list of notes. I found that this was not consumable, which means I essentially wasted time organizing my thoughts that way. I’ve since switched to using headers, sub-headers, etc. If I’m ever writing about something technical like coding or using a program, I’ll almost always end up with a header at the bottom called “Troubleshooting” where I put all of the errors I’ve ever encountered and how I fixed them.

Next to the headers, I’ll try to include links to references where I originally found the information. Here’s an example:

By doing this, if I’m confused later when I go to read the note, I’ll have more material that I can look through.

Searching

Once you have a lot of notes, searching is going to be important. Always put something where you expect it to be. That tip comes from real-life cleaning; if you’re looking for your Bluetooth speaker and you don’t find it in the first drawer that you search, then once you do find it, you should put it back in that drawer since that’s where you’re going to search for it next time.

Applying this to digital searching means that you should add keywords when you can’t find something at first. For example, I have a note about which filters we have to order for our fridge. I may search for “fridge” in my notes and not find it because it’s listed under “refrigerator parts”. When I finally find that note, I should just put “(keywords: fridge)” next to it.

One last thing: suppose you didn’t find the note because you never wrote it – you should add it! If you looked for it once, then you’re probably going to look for it again.

Specific tips

These tips apply specifically to OneNote. All of them are built-in (at least on Windows) and require no extra configuration.

Version history

By right-clicking a note and choosing “Show Page Versions”, you can see the history of a particular note:

This lets you recover what a note used to say, e.g. if you want to see what was on your grocery list 4 weeks ago or you accidentally deleted part of a note from your phone.

Linking between notes

I write a lot of technical notes, and I find myself wanting to refer between them. For example, I have a note about the website GitHub and a note on the technology Git, so of course there’s some overlap. To form a link to a particular section of a note, right-click a line and choose Copy Link to Paragraph:

After that, just paste the link in another note. The only thing to be careful of is that these links won’t work when you export to a PDF, so if you share these notes with someone else, then you may need to send them multiple PDFs.

Find time/date of a particular line in your notes

You can right-click any line in your notes to see when it is you wrote that note. For example, I’ve apparently wanted to write this blog post for the last two months:

This is most helpful when I reread a note and say “wait, that’s not right…” Sometimes I learn new information that invalidates a note, but I wouldn’t know if I’d had that information at the time of writing without this feature.

Fuzzy searching

Searching for a word without quotation marks will actually search for multiple forms/tenses of that word. E.g. a search for making will find hits like “make”, “makes”, and “made”. If you don’t want this functionality, you can wrap your search terms in quotation marks.

Conclusion

I’ve been “serious” about writing digital notes for about 7 years now, so I hope you can cut out the first few years of ramp-up time after reading this post. Again, I highly suggest OneNote for getting started, but find whatever software/methods work for you.

Update (9/23/18): I’ve switched to Visual Studio Code. Read more here.

I always strive to be as efficient as possible in whichever editor I’m using at the time. I’ve settled on Sublime Text for the last few years because it is fast and customizable. I’ll share the plug-ins that I use the most while working on Bot Land, but keep in mind that I’m writing Bot Land in JavaScript (specifically ES6), so some of the plug-ins that I show may not be relevant for your project.

Just a note: to install any of these packages, take a look at the Package Control installation guide.

DocBlockr (link)

Description: forms comments and automatically uses the JSDoc style.

Explanation: JavaScript is not statically typed, so let’s say you write a function that takes in a person as an argument. Should that person be a plain JavaScript object? Should it be a Person? Is it optional? What is the return type of the function, if anything? Making JSDocs will clarify this for you, and DocBlockr makes it easy, even abiding by any rulers that you’ve set in Sublime so that comments don’t extend too far horizontally.

Extra details: one “gotcha” for this plug-in is that sometimes you want to write comments like this:

// Individual comment line #1.
// 
// Individual comment line #2. The line directly above is
// intentionally blank
function foo() {
}

If you put the cursor on line one and try autoformatting (default: alt+Q on Windows), you’ll end up with this:

// Individual comment line #1. Individual comment line #2. The line directly
// above is intentionally blank

To fix this, make sure line 2 doesn’t have a trailing space.

Evaluate (link)

Description: runs the selected text through a Python `eval()` call.

Explanation: this is one of those plug-ins whose use is not immediately clear. It is just a wrapper around `eval`, meaning you could always open Sublime’s built-in Python interpreter (ctrl+backtick on Windows) and input your expression there. Here are a few instances where I’ve found it helpful (the first bullet point accounts for 99% of my uses with it):

• Evaluate mathematical expressions: `54 * 32` turns into 1728. That’s pretty straightforward, but this can be very useful with multiple cursors. For a contrived example, imagine you have this:

var life = 20;
var damage = 50;

Using multiple cursors, you could select both semicolons, insert `*2` before each one, then evaluate the selections to give you:

var life = 40;
var damage = 100;

• If you’re actually coding in Python, then Evaluate can be useful for testing Python behavior from right inside Sublime. For example, evaluating `[1, 2, 3] + [4, 5, 6]` will give you `[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]`.
• Generate long repeated strings: `”*” * 80` will give me 80 asterisks in a row. I use this for logging to the console sometimes.

FileDiffs (link)

Description: this lets you diff selections or tabs of arbitrary content.

Explanation: every programmer has a need for diffing text at some point, so I don’t think there’s too much to explain here. One nice thing is if you’re looking through a file and you want to compare, say, two functions to see what the differences are, you can just highlight them both, right-click, and choose “Diff Selections”.

Sublime Text Git (link)

Description: this is an interface for Git directly in Sublime (e.g. you can do “git status”, “git diff”, “git log”, etc. from the command menu).

Explanation: I got this for performing “git diff” from inside Sublime, but I honestly don’t find myself ever using it. I instead end up using TortoiseGit on Windows, but I still wanted to keep this on the list since I think it’s a good plug-in.

Extra details: make sure you initialize your repo by going to Tools → Git → Init. Specify the parent of a “.git” folder. Then, to use any of the “Git:” commands, you need to be working on a file that is a descendant of the folder you chose.

GitGutter (link)

Description: this shows an icon in your gutter when a line in the current file is different from what you have in your Git repository.

Explanation: this plug-in provides something that is seemingly very insignificant, but I really like seeing an icon when I’ve modified a line. It’s hard for me to articulate why though; I think I just like knowing that I’m not crazy and that I did indeed change a file without having to actually perform a diff. Plus, if you see the icon on a blank line, you know you’ve changed whitespace.

Extra details: in all of my time using Sublime, I’ve never had performance problems until I installed GitGutter. After that, moving lines up and down started acting very slow, but only on Windows. I changed two settings and the problems were fixed (update: May 17th, 2018: there’s only one setting now, and perhaps it no longer negatively impacts performance):

• Set “live_mode” to false.

The easiest way to make these changes is to go to Preferences → Package Settings → GitGutter → Settings – Default, but you really should override the defaults in the “Settings – User” file.

JsFormat (link)

Update (May 17th, 2018): I now use PrettierJS and a Sublime plug-in called JsPrettier to format files, but I’ll keep this section here since JsFormat is used in the video at the bottom of the post still.

Description: this runs JS Beautifier on the selected text, automatically correcting formatting and style.

Explanation: I installed this plug-in because the built-in command for “Indentation: Reindent Lines” never seemed to do what I wanted.

It can turn this code:

a=function squished(foo,bar){if(true){return foo+bar;}else{return foo*bar;}};

into this:

a = function squished(foo, bar) {
    if (true) {
        return foo + bar;
    } else {
        return foo * bar;
    }
};

ReverseR (link)

Update (February 16th, 2017): I’ve switched to using ToggleWords because it was written more sanely. I suggest you look at their GitHub page and ignore this section on ReverseR.

Description: converts a selected word into its opposite (e.g. “true” becomes “false”, “left” becomes “right”).

Explanation: I made this plug-in because of how often I needed to edit a configuration file and toggle something like “isDevMode: true” to “isDevMode: false”. I figured I might as well add in more pairs of words that are opposites (or close enough to opposites, e.g. “x” and “y”, “width” and “height”).

It also maintains casing:

• All lowercase: “true” becomes “false”
• All uppercase: “TRUE” becomes” FALSE”
• First letter capitalized: “True” becomes “False”

This means you can highlight `Width` in `getWidth`, run ReverseR, and now you’ll have `getHeight`.

Extra details: I did not ever plan on sharing this code, so I only uploaded it to http://botland.net, but if enough people say they like it, I could turn it into a proper Sublime package.

PlainTasks (link)

Description: this forms a TODO list with checkable items.

Explanation: I tend to keep “committable” items in a PlainTasks TODO list directly in Sublime, that way I can just switch tabs to see what I have left to do.

Extra details: the default color scheme is terrible. Go into Preferences → Package Settings → PlainTasks → Settings – User to change it:

{
 "color_scheme": "Packages/PlainTasks/tasks-monokai.hidden-tmTheme"
}

EasyMotion (link)

Description: quickly navigates to a particular character on the screen.

Explanation: suppose you’re on a line of code and want to get a particular instance of the letter ‘h’ on the screen.

You can invoke EasyMotion (ctrl+; by default), then type ‘h’, and it will tag all of the instances of that letter on your screen with a single-character keyboard key:

Now I can choose which ‘h’ I want to navigate by pressing the corresponding highlighted character. For example, to go to the very first ‘h’ on the page, I can type ‘k’.

Extra details: EasyMotion also comes with a shortcut (ctrl+shift+; by default) which will select all text between the original and new cursor positions.

Other plug-ins / thoughts

I don’t think these are worth linking to, but I’ve installed several plug-ins just for syntax highlighting: batch, PowerShell, 6502 assembly, ES6, and probably a few others.

If you ever find yourself typing a block of code repeatedly, consider making your own snippet. For example, in Bot Land, I frequently need to get a component from an entity, so I wrote a snippet to do that. There are resources online that show you how to do this, so if you need help, seek those out or look at the existing snippets that come bundled with Sublime.

Demo

I recorded a quick demo of some the above plug-ins:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YN-5IaU3TaM&w=420&h=315]