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EvanLiu.dev

👨‍💻 A Lazy Developer

I am one of those “lazy developers” who is “always looking for ways to do something faster, more efficiently.”

Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: « Laziness, Impatience and Hubris » — Larry Wall

My first job interview was introduced by a friend of a friend. After the interview, my new friend showed me what he was working on. I was blown away by how efficient he was on his IDE, compared to what I could do with the IDE I was using.

I realized that the key of programming efficiently is not to type faster, but to type less.

I started investing in tooling, with time and money. I looked for the most powerful IDEs, spent hours learning the features and shortcuts. I bought my first Mac to give those tools more memory, as Windows was still 32-Bit, which can only have 4GB of memory.

JetBrains IDEs

I first knew about JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA from John Lindquist ’s videos on Flash ActionScript, but I didn’t switch yet as I was still very happy with FDT . Then I needed to write some Objective-C and AppCode was an easy pick over Xcode. I have since then used:

I have been mostly using WebStorm in recent years, and there are more than 100 keyboard shortcuts that I more or less used. I created a table on Notion , trying to re-organise those shortcuts. I thought I could only memorise more of them to be more efficient.

Until…

Vim

I heard about Vim for a few times in the past, but I thought I didn’t need it. I believed that I could be just as efficient at editing texts with the IDE features and shortcuts. Then one of my colleagues switched from WebStorm to NeoVim and was very passionate about it. I asked him to show me how to do a few things in Vim, which I felt inefficient to do in IDE.

It was A LOT MORE efficient in those cases.

So I decided to learn Vim and give it a proper try with the IdeaVim plugin . Not only did it make me more efficient with text editing; once I learnt about leader key mapping, it totally changed the way I use IDE.

Instead of squeezing over 200 shortcuts into combinations of ⌘⌥⌃⇧ modifiers, any key on the keyboard (following the leader key, which is ␣ spacebar for me) can switch the keyboard to a different layer, on which each key can do a different thing.

e.g. leader s for “Source Control”,

  • ␣ s n to create a New branch
  • ␣ s N to create a New pull request

There are still places modifiers work better than leader keys:

  • Repeating actions, e.g., move lines/statements up/down.
  • Same mapping for the same/similar actions in different IDE contexts. e.g., move to previous/next change in the file, and previous/next diff in the diff view.

I am now settling with:

Zed

While learning Vim, I started using NeoVim for text file editing like configs and notes. I liked the speed, but the cost for setting everything up (config, plugins, etc.), was too high for me.

With Zed , I get the speed, Vim mode, and the (not yet) same mappings I have with IDEs.

I do not think I will switch to Zed for big projects. But I use it for all the text editing and small projects (config, note, scripts, etc.).

Karabiner-Elements

Text/Code editing is not all I do on computer though. I would like to use H J K L for ← ↓ ↑ → outside of the code editors, and use the same shortcuts for common actions in other apps, like browsers, too:

  • ⌃ + H/L for going back/forward history
  • ⌥ + H/L for going to previous/next tab

Karabiner-Elements to the rescue. It can do all of that and a lot more .

Together with some other tools , I continue the journey to be a more lazy productive Mac user.