This post is inspired by a recent conversation at work. We’re
performing an upgrade on a distributed storage cluster. I’m in the
driver seat, sharing my terminal on the big screen, we’re all following
a plan and making decisions about unexpected events. Its basically mob
cluster upgrading. And a colleage remarks at my use of the ^
substitution character on the command line - its the first time he sees
anyone actually using that. IIRC the command I typed was something like
^status^restart.
I’ve been using this substitution feature for a long while, its helpful to re-run the same command with different arguments or to fix a typo. This got me wondering about productivity and now I’m thinking - on my workstation, fully setup, how many widows do I have open when I’m getting stuff done.
At work, where I use a ticketing system (I should try Jira with Lynx) and several other collaboration tools, and tend to look at dashboards a lot, I need two applications up - terminal and browser. Usually I end up with multiple browsers, each with specific configuration and multiple terminals as well. The time split between the browser and the terminals is around half and half on average.
Outside of work, where I’m now typing this, the same two applications are sufficient too, but the time ratio between their use is more in favor of the terminal, probably something like 70 to 30. An editor and CLI tools are enough to get most of the things done here.
In summary - being efficient with the CLI tools is the icing. Don’t
just read someone’s blog and git pull their dotfiles repo , read the
man page and figure out what the tool can do and how it fits into your
toolbelt.