I don’t know that it always makes me more efficient, but I do like to see how much of my day to day computer usage can be done completely with the keyboard. One thing that has always vexed me a bit is managing window layouts.
I played with moom for a while, and really liked it in general, but I wanted something with a little more oomph. I ran into Slate and started playing around with it. The barrier to entry is fairly high (config is purely a text file) but it’s not terrible if you’re used to config files.
I’ve got a particular window layout I like to use when I’m writing code. I’m also not particularly careful about maintaining the window position (I move things around as my focus shifts). What I wanted was some way to easily reset back to my preferred window layout. So, I used slate to map cmd-ctrl-a to:
- launch Sublimetext
- launch iTerm
- launch SourceTree,
- Move iTerm to the left, full height
- Move Sublimetext to the right, full height
- Move SourceTree to the left most area on my 2nd monitor.
You can see a video of slate in action below.
So, no matter how much I move stuff around, cmd-ctrl-a will snap everything back (launching it as needed) to where I want it.
Here is a link to my slate.conf. Enjoy.