After giving it some thought, I’ve decided to write a post cataloging the various tools, tips, tricks, and commands that I could not live without. These have been gathered over the past three years, and I know that a list like this would have been invaluable to me when I was first getting started. Luckily I had a lot of great people around me to clue me in to this stuff, but for those who are not so lucky, I hope this post is helpful.

Software

  • Better Snap Tool - The ultimate tool for organizing and managing windows on mac
  • OnePassword - Best password manager I know of
  • Alfred - Worth the price for the paste history alone, but also has some great customization features for becoming a mac power user.

Editor Plugins

These plugins are specific to atom, my editor of choice, but if you don’t use atom you should still be able to find something very similar.

Rails

  1. _

    I can use _ in the rails con set a variable to the return value of my last expression. For example, if I do User.where(email: foo@bar.com), I can then do user = _ and it will set user to the return value of User.where(email: foo@bar.com).

  2. reload!

    This will load the latest code into the rails console environment. This will prevent you from having to close and reopen your rails console every time you make a change to the code.

Git

  1. git commit --amend --no-edit

    I have an alias for this and I use it more than I would like to admit. My typical use case is I make a commit and then realize I missed a piece of code that should have gone in with that commit. After realizing this I simply do git add file-i-changed, git commit --amend --no-edit, and then git push --force (be very careful with force push; I only do it on branches that I alone am working on).

  2. git log

    Allows you to see the commit history in your current branch; it comes in handy all the time.

  3. git cherry-pick

    I am constantly amazed by this command. It allows you to take a commit from one branch and put it in another. For example, if I am currently working on the foo branch and want to take a commit with a sha of 1234 from the staging branch. I would simply do git cherry-pick 1234 and it will put that commit on top of the commits in my foo branch.

Command Line

  • tmux - Allows you to control multiple terminal environments in one screen. A must if you have a project that requires multiple builds to be running locally.
  • oh-my-zsh - For managing your zsh config