Good Developer Hygeine #2

Professional software developers won’t do any serious development without source control.  Yet I’ve met numerous developers that give me a blank look when I ask them which clipboard manager they use.

Less important than source control, but still an important #2, is a clipboard manager. With a clipboard manager you have version control in the immediate term, before you commit your changes. 

As soon as code gets written it should enter into a never ending process of minor and major refactoring. The main way refactoring happens is with the clipboard. It is inevitable that you’ll copy or cut again while there is code that you still need in your clipboard. Uh oh! Now what?

Enter the clipboard manager. With a click of the mouse or a tap of the hot key you pull up your clipboard manager and browse through all your prior copy and cuts. Find what you need and paste it back in. It’s so important, yet I’m amazed that not every developer has discovered how crucial this bit of kit is.

These days I use Stuf on the Mac as a clipboard manager. I’m not overly thrilled with it, but it seems to be the best of a very numerous and fairly sorry lot (clipboard managers seem to be a common first development project for new Mac developers, so the quality, as a rule, is not so good). There are many equivalent clipboard managers on Linux and Windows as well, both free and paid. It’s not so important which you chose, as long as you use one.

One area clipboard manager’s fall down is with delete. If you delete a code fragment, rather than cut it, it never enters the clipboard. Of course, your text editor probably has nearly unlimited undo, so getting the deleted code back should still be possible… but often you’ll have many changes in the file that you do want to keep. So then it’s a matter of undoing up to the delete, copying the code you need, then redoing back to where you were. A pain, and prone to a screw up.

I’d love to see a clipboard manager with the option to capture deletes and treat them as cuts, or alternatively, a programmer’s text editor or text editor plugin (TextMate or BBEdit please!) with the option to send deletes to the clipboard.

Not using a clipboard manager? Stop what you’re doing and go get one immediately. You’ll thank me soon enough.

Image by Augapfel.