Coding: Increase Your Reading and Writing Speed

A teammate of mine recently expressed a desire for a shortcut for something we type often. I started looking into our shortcut options and came to a common determination: We can do this, but the number of 2 key shortcuts available to us is finite, so we better use them wisely.

I wrote the following unix to give me a rough idea of what we type frequently.

find . -name "*.clj" | xargs cat | tr -s '[:space:]:#()[]{}\"' '\n' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

note: If you're not writing clojure you'll want to look for something other than .clj files, and you might also want to tweak what you replace with a new line.

The above unix gave me an ordered list of the most typed 'words' across all of my codebases. At this point I had some science for setting up some shortcuts.

Writing

You'll want to look into whatever editor/ide you use and see if you can find key shortcuts and snippet expansion. My editor is emacs; I assigned some key-chords and some yasnippets. If you're not using emacs you should have something similar in whatever you are using.

While I wanted to define some shortcuts, I also didn't want to create so many that I was constantly wasting time looking up what I'd created. Based on that desire I created:

• 2 shortcuts (key-chords) for two of the most duplicated words. The shortcuts are concise by design, but that makes them a bit harder to remember. You can probably get started with more than 2, but I didn't see much harm in starting there.
• a dozen snippets for the next most used words. These snippets are descriptive enough to easily remember, thus I felt comfortable defining several of them. e.g. pps expands to (println (pr-str )).

Having shortcuts and snippets will obviously make me more productive, and the unix helped me figure out which words were the most important to optimize for.

Reading

Most editors/ides also give you a summary view for common code patterns. For example, IntelliJ displays lambdas when the actual code is actually an anonymous class. Emacs gives you font-lock for turning patterns into individual characters. Armed with my list of the most common words in my codebase, I created font-locks for the 11 most duplicated.

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Below is a function definition without any font locks applied.


The following image is what the same function looks like with custom font locks applied. It might be a bit jarring at first, but in the long run it should add up to many small victories such as quickly identifying patterns in code and less line breaks.

Results

I've been working with these settings for a little over a week now. I haven't needed to look up anything I defined, and I get a little burst of satisfaction when I read or write something faster than I'd been able to in the past. I'd definitely recommend doing something similar with your codebase and ide/editor.