Productivity enhancing Software - Part III
This is part III of the series. Today I'll cover following tools
Vim: Editor of the Beast
I've been using vi since last 10 years, naturally vim was an easy option when I was looking for vi-clone on windows. vi clone is available on windows via cygwin. If all you want is an editor, cygwin is too bulky. So I opted for Vim. I started using Vim with version 5.7. Earlier when working on MS platform, I've also tried Vim and Visual studio integration. It is awkward at best. My usage of Vim continued. It just made me far more productive than Notepad. I used SciTE for longest time and then came vim 7.
The most important feature for me has to be integrated spell checker. With this option, I believe vim is complete as general purpose editor. For me it was always the editor meant for programmers (with syntax highlighting and all). It definitely improves your productivity as a programmer. Coming back to spell checker, I can now use vim as my only editor. Earlier I used to type us the text in Vim an then copy/paste into some other program with built-in spell checker, make the corrections. But problem was that I had to do this several times, as I edit and re-edit the contents. It was inconvenient. But now I'm writing this entry in Vim 7 and fixing the spelling errors, on the go, as Vim points out the errors visually.
I had never looked beyond programmer-friendly features of Vim till Vim7, but now I have started looking at all the features again. I like working with tabs (Firefox being my choice for the browser). Besides multiple documents in Tabs, Vim provides the capability to split the windows vertically or horizontally, so that you can compare two documents or work on multiple documents, while you cycle thru them using Ctrl+Tab.
It lets you convert the text into HTML. Now, it may not be apparent how useful this is, but I used to use this to convert the .diff files into color coded HTML files when sending the review notice. It is very useful for the reviewers to visually see the difference.
If all the inbuilt functionality is not enough, there are Vim scripts. The scripts will let you extend the functionality.
EverNote :Keep all your notes in one place
One of my colleagues is a die-hard MS OneNote Fan. He recommended me to use MS OneNote, and I tried the trial version for a while. To be frank, it was bit of a hassle to use OneNote all the time. So I stopped using it. I wasn't impressed much. I continued with combination of text files, notes written on paper, OutLook notes etc. It was not pretty. Then I got a laptop. It was easier to carry it with me for all the meetings, so more and more of my note taking started happening online. That is when I realized that I really need to get my notes organized. Around same time I came across EverNote as a free alternative to MS OneNote. Since it was free, there was no risk in trying. But I was really impressed with the ease of use.
Here are some of the important features I like the most:
Endless Tape: This was lacking with MS OneNote, and what made it difficult to use. This interface mimics the real paper notebook.
Categories: You see the categories on the left panel, and drag the categories on the note. With MSON, you had to decide on the category first, and what if particular note belonged to multiple category ?
Search: This has be integral part of any note taking software. Evernote does a good job of it. I never used MSON long enough to know how well the search works there. EN has a cool feature called keyword search, which is similar to Outlook's Search Folder concept. Let the note be anywhere, with keyword search, it shows up here.
I know for sure that my meetings have been far more productive after I started using EverNote on my laptop. I can quickly find the previous meeting minutes notes and it is easy to follow up.
To be continued ....
Part I
Part II
- Gvim : Editor of the Beast
- EverNote : Keep all your notes in one place
Vim: Editor of the Beast
I've been using vi since last 10 years, naturally vim was an easy option when I was looking for vi-clone on windows. vi clone is available on windows via cygwin. If all you want is an editor, cygwin is too bulky. So I opted for Vim. I started using Vim with version 5.7. Earlier when working on MS platform, I've also tried Vim and Visual studio integration. It is awkward at best. My usage of Vim continued. It just made me far more productive than Notepad. I used SciTE for longest time and then came vim 7.
The most important feature for me has to be integrated spell checker. With this option, I believe vim is complete as general purpose editor. For me it was always the editor meant for programmers (with syntax highlighting and all). It definitely improves your productivity as a programmer. Coming back to spell checker, I can now use vim as my only editor. Earlier I used to type us the text in Vim an then copy/paste into some other program with built-in spell checker, make the corrections. But problem was that I had to do this several times, as I edit and re-edit the contents. It was inconvenient. But now I'm writing this entry in Vim 7 and fixing the spelling errors, on the go, as Vim points out the errors visually.
I had never looked beyond programmer-friendly features of Vim till Vim7, but now I have started looking at all the features again. I like working with tabs (Firefox being my choice for the browser). Besides multiple documents in Tabs, Vim provides the capability to split the windows vertically or horizontally, so that you can compare two documents or work on multiple documents, while you cycle thru them using Ctrl+Tab.
It lets you convert the text into HTML. Now, it may not be apparent how useful this is, but I used to use this to convert the .diff files into color coded HTML files when sending the review notice. It is very useful for the reviewers to visually see the difference.
If all the inbuilt functionality is not enough, there are Vim scripts. The scripts will let you extend the functionality.
EverNote :Keep all your notes in one place
One of my colleagues is a die-hard MS OneNote Fan. He recommended me to use MS OneNote, and I tried the trial version for a while. To be frank, it was bit of a hassle to use OneNote all the time. So I stopped using it. I wasn't impressed much. I continued with combination of text files, notes written on paper, OutLook notes etc. It was not pretty. Then I got a laptop. It was easier to carry it with me for all the meetings, so more and more of my note taking started happening online. That is when I realized that I really need to get my notes organized. Around same time I came across EverNote as a free alternative to MS OneNote. Since it was free, there was no risk in trying. But I was really impressed with the ease of use.
Here are some of the important features I like the most:
Endless Tape: This was lacking with MS OneNote, and what made it difficult to use. This interface mimics the real paper notebook.
Categories: You see the categories on the left panel, and drag the categories on the note. With MSON, you had to decide on the category first, and what if particular note belonged to multiple category ?
Search: This has be integral part of any note taking software. Evernote does a good job of it. I never used MSON long enough to know how well the search works there. EN has a cool feature called keyword search, which is similar to Outlook's Search Folder concept. Let the note be anywhere, with keyword search, it shows up here.
I know for sure that my meetings have been far more productive after I started using EverNote on my laptop. I can quickly find the previous meeting minutes notes and it is easy to follow up.
To be continued ....
Part I
Part II
1 comment:
thank you for sharing with your experience. well, what about vim then, do you drop it and jump to evernote (which is like ms onenote you don't like). i keep my notes in onenote several years, what is really bad there you have to interrupt your finger moving when you need any movements in the text when you lift your hand to move mouse or press "->". there is no even search/substitute there that can be easily used. vim in these operations is just perfect. so, what to do to make writing productive? you need your notes organized as in onenote, and you very much need all the operations under you fingers as in vim. any advice please. thank you. boris
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