Making Things Easier

A family member and I were having an argument a discussion about the relative ease of using a MacBook Pro with macOS and a Lenovo laptop with Linux. A lot of you guys are thinking, “Yeah, I’m with the Linux guy!” but before you choose sides you should know that he has been seduced by the dark side and is a Vim user1.

Anyway, the discussion evolved into how you would put a link to a Web page open in your browser into an email. My family member said he would double click on the URL bar of the browser, switch to his email, and middle click to insert the link. I replied that I don’t even have a middle button but that I don’t need one because I’m an Emacs user and had written a bit of Elisp to automatically insert the URL of the browser’s currently active page. Thus I merely started writing my email and when I got to the place that needed the link, I just called my Elisp.

That bit of Elisp is a function called jcs-insert-url but I said that the most I ever had to type was Meta+x j i u and often I only needed part of it depending on how autocompletion was feeling at the time. I added that I could, of course, add a key binding like Hyper+u to call the function and make the whole process even easier. Then I started wondering why I hadn’t done that. I keep on typing Meta+x j i u whenever I want to insert a URL. That’s crazy. So I added the binding and now my life is even easier.

The point of this post—finally—is a reminder to myself and to you to occasionally think about your workflow and ask if there’s some adjustment that would make things easier. It’s amazing how often the answer is yes.

Footnotes:

1

I’m just trash talking. Regular readers know I was a Vi/Vim user for many years, still think highly of it, and consider it one of the two best editors for serious programmers.

This entry was posted in General and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.