Find the perfect tools - Productive programmer

• Find your perfect editor and learn it inside and out.
• These are the things I think the perfect editor should have,
  • A macro recorder
  • Record macros for all symmetrical text manipulation.
  • Launchable from the command line
  • Regular expression search and replace
  • Good knowledge of regular expressions can save orders of magnitude of effort.
  • Additive cut and copy commands
  • Don’t make round trips when you can batch.
  • Multiple registers
  • the old-school name for multiple clipboards.
  • Cross-platform
• JEdit I must admit that this one surprised even me. I had used JEdit for several years, then kind of wandered away. But, as I was putting my list together, I reevaluated JEdit and it meets every criteria on the list.
• TextMate (and eEditor)
• Use a “real” scripting language for automation chores.
• One of the serious disadvantages of command-line tools like bash sed awk, and others is the lack of testability. Of course, you generally don’t need to test these types of utilities…until you really, really need to test them.
• main disadvantages of Ant is the lack of testability as Ant files grow to thousands of lines of “code”
• Groovy Ant task, you can include this builder file as part of your build process, autogenerating your XML configuration every time you perform a build.
• Never write XML by hand; always generate it.
• Keep behavior in (testable) code.
• If you start all your automation projects out in a powerful scripting language, it allows you to make the call as to when it becomes invaluable to add the kind of infrastructure of real code.
• Pay attention to the evolution of your tools.
• boat anchor is a tool that you are forced to use even though it is ridiculously ill-suited for the job at hand. Frequently, this boat anchor costs a vast amount of money, increasing the political pressure to use it for every situation.
• Pay as little complexitax as you can.
• Demonstrate simpler solutions
• Don’t be ashamed to resort to begging; getting your way can save you massive amounts of time on an ongoing basis.
• It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission
• Fight internal feature creep and boat anchors
• Being saddled with an inappropriate tool may seem like a minor thing (especially to nondevelopers), but it can have a huge impact on the overall productivity of developers.
• A cut on the roof of your mouth isn’t fatal, but the constant low-grade irritation keeps you from concentrating on important things. In- appropriate tools do the same thing.