Possibly my all-time favourite XKCD,
Is it worth the time?¹, demonstrates two important points. If you only do something very rarely anyway, spending time to automate it won’t have a great ROI. But for things you do moderately often that take a minute or even just a few seconds, you can afford to spend a surprisingly large amount of time optimising them and still get a big pay-off over a time frame measured in years.
I view time spent learning to use my tools efficiently and automating common tasks as a sound investment. Editors are a great example. Sure, I could fire up any of the usual suspects and write code somewhat productively. But in my fully customised editor of choice, I can insert and adapt common code patterns that would take me 10–30 seconds to type out fully in mere moments using templates and macros. I can jump to any position visible on-screen with around three keystrokes. I can see syntax highlighting for various file types that I use all the time, including some unusual ones that don’t have definitions readily available, and warnings for several different programming languages in real time as I work.
These save me a few seconds every time I use them, but how many times is that every day? The effort to set them up has probably repaid itself 100x over by now! And the lack of latency is also a qualitative improvement since it means once I’m ready to start writing, I can do so roughly as fast as I can think, instead of constantly being held back and interrupted for a moment.
¹ https://xkcd.com/1205/
I view time spent learning to use my tools efficiently and automating common tasks as a sound investment. Editors are a great example. Sure, I could fire up any of the usual suspects and write code somewhat productively. But in my fully customised editor of choice, I can insert and adapt common code patterns that would take me 10–30 seconds to type out fully in mere moments using templates and macros. I can jump to any position visible on-screen with around three keystrokes. I can see syntax highlighting for various file types that I use all the time, including some unusual ones that don’t have definitions readily available, and warnings for several different programming languages in real time as I work.
These save me a few seconds every time I use them, but how many times is that every day? The effort to set them up has probably repaid itself 100x over by now! And the lack of latency is also a qualitative improvement since it means once I’m ready to start writing, I can do so roughly as fast as I can think, instead of constantly being held back and interrupted for a moment.
¹ https://xkcd.com/1205/