Productivity Tools

[whatisgravity]

I thought it would be worth having a thread to discuss productivity tools to make our limited volunteering time have more impact.

I have been working on rebuilding my development environment and compartmentalizing using containers. While I have been doing this I have been reworking my deploy scripts, rebuilding my backup scripts, improving my vim configs, reviewing and practicing rust, and doing research.

In the process I have been reviewing different tools to organize my notes for the various aspects of this project and others.

Editing

Multiplexer
If you do not currently use a multiplexer, I highly recommend familiarizing yourself with the popular options. Tmux and screen both work well, these tools allow you to tile your terminal windows within a shared context.

vim

When I need to just setup VIM and get to work, I have typically just settled with Janus, which is a collection of handy plugins. When combined with a vim-go plugin, you can compile from within VIM and run tests which streamlines the development process. There are also specific git plugins, so almost everything can be done from within VIM.

Recently I have settled on the minimalistic plugin manager vim-plug for managing plugins and building a custom setup.

Note Taking

I have been using a simple key/value store and script for note taking but I'm familiarizing myself with rust by modifying an existing one in rust called theca. Depending on your needs it works well.

Task Management

Taskwarrior - A very complete CLI task management tool, calendar and more.

Password management

pass - Open source command line tool that stores passwords encrypted with specified GPG keys. If you git init the ~/.password-store folder, it will automatically commit every change to the passwords. And you can setup a cronjob to even push it off-site, either to a private gitlab installation, private bitbucket, but being encrypted with GPG it can even be on github. This does not necessarily save time, but it greatly increases your security.

Share your own tools you find helpful to save others research time, it may be helpful for someone even if they don't reply.