8 posts tagged with "productivity"

Sooner or later you make the same small edit on line one, then line two, then line three. Neovim has had several ways to avoid that loop for years, and a newer one arrives with 0.13: built-in multicursor. This post walks through each method with a small example, covers multicursor in depth, and ends with a rule of thumb and a keystroke count for nine exercises. Multicursor is available only in nightly builds until Neovim 0.13 ships; every other method works in any Neovim, and in Vim.

The post goes with the video Neovim Multi-Line Editing Overview, Multicursor Included, which plays three of the exercises live.

The text you need next is usually already on your screen. A pod name three commands back, the error string you want to search for, a URL a tool printed, the long flag you typed twenty minutes ago. Getting it into your current prompt means reaching for the mouse, and the mouse gets it wrong: a soft-wrapped line comes back with a newline in the middle, and a newline in a shell paste runs the command. This post covers a tmux plugin that selects the range by the words you remember, shows you the selection in the real pane while you type, and pastes it without submitting it.

If you run more than one Claude Code account on a machine (work and personal, two clients, a locked-down login next to a sandbox), you switch between them by hand. Claude Code holds one active login at a time, so forgetting to switch means running the wrong account. This post shows how to make the switch automatic: the right account loads from the directory you are in, with nothing to remember.

Neovim 0.12 landed with a pile of things that used to be plugins: a native plugin manager (vim.pack), a native :restart, stock LSP keymaps, treesitter incremental selection. The release notes read like a checklist of things to rip out of your config.

So I went through mine, one area at a time, asking each the same question: should this move to the 0.12 way of doing it?

Four of the seven came back with some flavor of "no," and that turned out to be the useful part. Three earned a yes and I made the changes. The rest I left alone on purpose. The features are real and they work, but whether your config should adopt them is a different question, and the honest answer was mostly to leave it alone.

You've typed a 10-word kubectl command. You realize the namespace is wrong. Now you're holding Ctrl+Left six times to get there. Or worse, reaching for the mouse.

Vim solved this for text editing decades ago. Why are we still navigating command lines like it's 1985?

zsh-jumper brings fuzzy search to command line navigation. Press a key, pick a word, cursor jumps there. Or press ; and a letter for instant EasyMotion-style jumps.

You install a plugin for multi-cursor editing. Another for shell integration. A third for incremental search preview. Your plugin count grows, startup time increases, and you debug compatibility issues between packages.

Most of these features exist in vanilla Neovim. Have existed since Vim 7. Here are 10 built-in features that replace common plugins.

You add a new tmux binding. A week later you're hunting through .tmux.conf because you can't remember what you mapped to prefix + g. The shortcuts.yaml you maintain? Three months out of date.

The problem isn't discipline. It's architecture. Any system requiring manual sync between source of truth (config files) and documentation (shortcuts file) will drift.

Parse your config files directly. For workflows that don't map to a single keybinding, use tealdeer custom pages. One popup, two modes, zero maintenance.

This technique is useful when a program you can't modify calls CLI tools on your machine. For example, pet search pipes output directly to fzf with no filtering options. PATH hijacking lets you intercept and modify this behavior without changing either program.