Growing up, I spent a lot of time in the garage with my dad. He's a man of many projects - and hardly a weekend went past where I wasn't helping him work on something: from cars, to household repairs, lawn work or tinkering with electronics. I learned a lot about tools and how to use them, and I learned that the right tool for the job can make all the difference.
Two things that he used to tell me often were:
- Power tools are always out to get you. They may feel like they'll help you get the job done fast, but they're powerful, and they don't care about your fingers. Respect them and act as though they're always trying to hurt you.
- There's nothing worse than having to fix your tools. If you take care of your tools, they'll take care of you. Keep them clean, sharp, and in good working order.
These are both true - and while rule #1 is less applicable to software tools, rule #2 is absolutely something that I've found to be true in my career as a software engineer. The tools we use to get our work done are incredibly important, and taking the time to tune them to work just right can make a huge difference in our productivity and happiness.
Tuning your tools just feels good
I use Visual Studio Code for nearly all of my coding and writing. I love it because it's quick and customizable, and it just works well. No shade if you're a fan of vim; you do you. I dig VS Code, and I've spend some time recently changing up my setup to make it even better.
Here's a few things I've done recently to tune my VS Code experience:
Houston theme
There's an installable theme for VS Code called Houston which was actually made by the team that makes Astro. If you prefer a dark theme and like some spicy accent colors, you might like Houston.
Zen Mode
Zen Mode for VS Code is a great way to tune your IDE to be more focused. I use it for writing articles and newsletters. It's built in to VS Code, so you don't need to install anything. Just press Ctrl + K, Z to enter Zen Mode, or the Toggle Zen Mode command in the command palette.
Straight out of the box, Zen mode is pretty damn minimal - and that's not for everyone (myself included). To customize Zen mode, open up VS Code settings with Command + , and search for zenMode. Y
Pieces for VS Code
Pieces for VS Code is... amazing. It's a contextualized note-taking app and code copilot that helps you store, annotate, and generate code snippets in your IDE. Not only is it context aware -- as in, it knows what you're working on as well as the places where you're doing research -- but it also features an on-device, privary first LLM that can generate code snippets and notes without sending your data to the cloud. 🤯
It comes from the lean, mean squad at Pieces for Developers. If Pieces sounds familiar, you probably know about it because of my interview with their founder Tsavo Knott on Software Engineering Daily a few months back, and definitely not from Scott Hanselman's recent podcast about it. 😅
More from me about whipping VS Code into shape
- Minimalists will appreciate How to make VS Code load faster with a little bit of housekeeping. Spoiler alert: the crux of this one is getting rid of things you don't use.
- If you made the switch from Intel to an M1, M2, or M3 Mac in the past few years, don't miss my article on Making VS Code Quicker on Apple Silicon Macs. If you're affected by this one, the gains are huge.
- This quick tutorial on using the refactor menu in VS code was an awakening for me - I didn't know how much I was missing out on until I started using it!
- If you're a TypeScript dev, there's a couple troubleshooting steps I use to fix TypeScript errors in VS Code when nothing else seems to work.
Find me online wherever you get your internet
Recently, I've been releasing past newsletters as podcasts - you can find them in your podcatcher under "Tiny Improvements", or if you prefer a direct link, you can subscribe on Spotify, Apple Music, Pocket Casts, and good ol' RSS.
They're a few minutes long each, and are a ton of fun to make. I hope you enjoy them!
I'm also releasing occasional videos (both short- and long-form) to my YouTube Channel @mikebifulco. I'd love it if you'd subscribe and let me know what you think of the content.
Hey though, how are you doing?
I hope you're doing well. As always, I'd love to know what you're working on, what you think of Tiny Improvements, and what you'd like to see more of. Hit reply and let me know - I do my best to respond to every email I get.
Keep up the good work, and I'll see you in the next one.
