Often when we talk about productivity of developers, we will measure various outputs. In the worst places, this metric might be lines of code. In better ones, it will be bugs density, features completed, support requests answered. Often, to get better at these we will reference things like better software design, maintainable code, unit tests, and more. Some of these focus on letting other people read our code in a more efficient manner and others just help us write better code for ourselves. The best will do both. There is another side of the equation, though. We write readable code because we know that eventually someone else will read it, even if that “someone” is ourselves. The thing we neglect to also talk about sometimes is that being able to read your code in an efficent way is almost as important.
This might sound obvious. It might even seem like it goes without saying. However, I have witnessed many developers that simply do not use any hot keys or know the shortcuts to navigate their editor. They do not use any shortcuts. When you are reading a dense chunk of code, this can cost you minutes that will add up in a very long session. These days, I do mostly web development so I will be speaking mostly from that perspective. I use Atom and Visual Studio Code as my main editors and feel comfortable talking about these. Even though I prefer Visual Studio Code more nowadays, I focus a lot on Atom since I think a lot more developers still use it. It’s very popular and because of that, I feel like a lot of people use it without actually configuring it properly. It is is possible that this phenomenon is exclusive to web developers but I have a feeling it can be applied to others, too. I feel like developers with full IDEs are more aware of these kinds of things, especially in languages like Java where the tooling has been very good for a while now.
These are some things you need to learn to use, else you are severely missing out:
**Jump to method **. If you are pressing Ctrl + F to find a method inside of your code, you are doing it wrong. Most IDEs and even text editors, such as Atom (with the proper language server / support) can jump straight there. For example, in Atom, you can do this with Ctrl + R (at least on Linux) There are numerous advantages
Go to file / class. This is also a big one that I see a lot of people use already and it is rare that I do not see someone use it. Hunting for a single class or file in your structure is painful and could require dozens of seconds to get right, depending on how large your project is. Ctrl + Shift + F is not the right answer == instead, use something like Ctrl + P in Atom or Ctrl + O in Jetbrains IDEs. … and now you get something that can help you find a file very quickly.
If your tooling supports it, learn your quick navigation tools such as “Go to class” or “Go to definition” when you have a word selected. Visual Studio Code has good support for this.
In fact, there are a ton more. These are just some of the very basic ones that kill me I see someone not using them. Atom does not support much out of the box but Visual Studio Code supports a ton more. I do not need to repeat much more of what is already available. Just read the documentation for your IDE if you have not already. Scour the web, people have summarized their findings for you.
I’ll put some links below to some good articles on getting the most out of your IDE for code navigation:
Just learn your keyboard shortcuts.
These are just a few things I have done to my Atom install. For each thing, I identified where time was being sunk into and then make changes to make things less cumbersome.
There are tons of other things you can do. The web has covered them all everywhere and there is no reason to repeat everything that has been blogged to death. Instead, I beg, notice what you are doing and what is taking forever. Then, you should find a way to fix it. Just by changing up a few things, I saved myself a lot of frustrating and got some very helpful hints while reading code.
Yeah, that is really all I wanted to say. All this information is already available elsewhere if you are looking for it but nobody talks about this in academics. In school, you are not taught to learn about your tooling all the time. (At least, I was not) If you have good co-workers, they will probably point out your inefficiency when they see it. If you are self employed, you will need to discover this on your own. You know, most people already know this stuff. But I hope this will reach someone out there whom never considered it.
Happy reading and navigating.