Programming tools I’ve recently tried

Emacs projectile and helm for quickly navigating files/projects. This creates basically a highly souped-up “find file” dialog for Emacs, with spiffier autocompletion and an auto-updating list of possible completions. I think autocomplete is a super important programming tool and interface paradigm so I’m really glad for this.

Emacs ggtags for quickly navigating Emacs source code by jumping to definitions/usage of functions (similar to cmd-click in Xcode). Only has a few features that git grep doesn’t, but it has nicer integration with Emacs—it comes with hotkeys and a nice mode for navigating between tag occurrences. It also comes with a Helm datasource that lets you do a reasonable impression of Sublime’s cmd-t behavior by merging together files and ggtags symbols. And a projectile integration to re-generate tags for the project (which I haven’t set up yet).

Notifications Scripting to do fancy notification things with AppleScript. I use this to pop-up a notification every 10 minutes when Slack is running reminding me to quit it (Slack is great but it can be distracting to have open while I’m trying to do heads-down engineering work).

Git precommit hooks to remind our team to get various pieces of code reviewed. The annoying thing about these is that they’re not version controlled (they live inside the .git dir), so I had to write a special repo setup script that lived in version control and linked itself to .git and ran the hooks. (I’m surprised someone hadn’t written it already, but whatever.)