Use Your Tools
Table of Contents
Use Your Tools
These are some personal thoughts, written after seeing people sit sadly at computers doing things that the computer should really be doing for them, and saying things like "let's see if I can get it to…". As a geek by temperament, it makes me think that the power relations have gotten all skew-whiff. My mental shorthand for it is "nobody should be working at a computer: they should be telling the computer to do the work". Not everyone is a skilled computer toucher, and not everyone has complete autonomy when using a computer, particularly for work, but the following stuff can be applied by most people to a degree.
Use your tools
So often I see people using full-featured space-age IDEs as text editors with a terminal attached. All the refactoring tools, debugging aids, version control stuff are neglected. Integrated documentation? Nah, let's Google it, and click the first Stack Overflow result.
There's a great XKCD strip about the time saved on tasks and whether it's worth automating, and the same principle applies to learning the smoothest way to do things: if you're going to be using it for more than a month, it's worth taking a couple of hours to read through basic documentation and work through a tutorial.
While I'm at it, use boredom and annoyance as a strong signal that a tool may exist to make this boring and annoying task go away.
You are sitting at a machine that your peers across the world and over decades have refined. They gave you tools: use them!
Use your tools
I literally just heard someone say "there's a screen set up, so I have to put it in a presentation". The best thing you can do when working with computers is set out, for yourself, the problem and solution without naming tools, just the desired results. Of course, you aren't creating the world from scratch, you will eventually have to use what's available to you, but you can hold the line and not include "open PowerPoint" or "install Kubernetes" as part of your thinking process. One thing I love to do is work in plain text until the last possible opportunity, and then have a separate "make this into an appropriate-looking Word/PowerPoint/PDF" activity step. It stops me getting into typography/design when I just want to put information out there.
Use your tools, don't let them use you!
Use your tools
You probably would not like sitting at my computer. It has a tiling window manager, when you switch it on, it opens Emacs automatically and the theme is a green colour which I like and you probably wouldn't. My browser has multiple colour-coded pinned tabs for different clients and I avoid desktop apps, preferring web apps where possible so that I can keep them in containers. I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts, and I have remapped my keyboards so that the caps lock key acts as control, putting it conveniently on the home row for typing and meaning my pinky doesn't get sore.
This is the counterpart to the first point: once you have taken the time to learn the tools available, take the time to select your tools, and to configure those tools to work for you.
Make the tools yours, then use your tools.