Many programmers don't use their editor's advanced features, a fact which increases the time used in editing and the frequency of errors.
Using advanced features makes code editing much more comfortable, faster and safer. Therefore, try to find out about the capabilities of your code editor. Some examples of the advanced features editors provide are:
- indent a visually selected range
- commenting/uncommenting a visually selected range
- deleting a whole line
- deleting a string inside quotation marks
- searching for a string under cursor
- searching with a regex
- searching and replacing with a regex
- completing a partial method name
- jumping to the definition of a class or a method
- refactoring tools which change the design of code to another one, yet preserve its behavior. e.g. move a loop into a method of its own and make sure all the variables still work like they did before
More information
Online
Literature
- Pragmatic Programming (3.16. "Power Editing") by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas
- Code Complete (Chapter 30. "Programming Tools") by Steve McConnell
