If you’re an aspiring developer, there’s a lot to learn out there. From how to code in Python to how to use Unity, there are plenty of platforms that offer tutorials and introduce you to the tools you’ll need. But what about the apps that can support the work you do?
You don’t have to spend hours on the app store searching for them—we’ve done the hard work for you. Here are five essential apps for developers.
Table of Contents
Best Apps For Developers
best apps for web developers
Here’s the thing, being busy and being productive are two different things. You can be busy doing anything that may or may not be productive or involve accomplishing much. Or, you may spend your maximum time doing repetitive tasks that can otherwise be automated or scrolling through emails.
On the other hand, being productive means doing quality work efficiently, such as writing code, testing and executing code, and thinking about logic without procrastinating or feeling exhausted.
Efficiency and effectiveness are essential attributes of a programmer. Those programmers are in high demand who can write high-quality lines of code at a faster speed. It’s because they can help companies or clients solve their problems quicker than others.
At this time, you need to be both hard-working and smart. Of course, you need to be highly skilled to write quality code, but you must also employ automation and productivity apps to help ease certain processes. It may include various tasks such as code search, task management, testing, time tracking, code execution, password management, and more.
Using different productivity apps, programmers can take charge of their time, manage tasks effectively, automate repetitive tasks, and make better decisions.
In this article, I’ll be introducing some of the productivity tools for programmers in software development.
Check them out!
Code Search Tools
If you want to understand the way systems are organized, you as a programmer must look for different files that comprise the entire system. And it is challenging to find specific code in larger software systems with thousands of files in several programming languages.
This is where code search tools or code search engines come into play. They simplify the task of developers by allowing them to search the code they are looking for from various software projects. As a result, it helps them accelerate their code writing part and makes the development process faster.
Searchcode
Search 75+ billion lines of code with the help of Searchcode. It makes these lines of code available from 40+ million projects and features a search bar where you can enter some special character and hit enter.
The Silver Searcher
The Silver Searcher is an excellent tool by Geoff.Greer.fm that helps you search code. It was introduced as a clone of another tool, Ack, which has somewhat different features now. The tool is incredibly faster, almost 5 to 10 times faster than that of Ack. To date, they have released several versions to improve its performance, usability, features, stability, and other aspects.
The Silver Searcher is so fast because it uses Pthreads to leverage multiple search files and CPU cores in parallel. In addition, its files utilize mmap() rather than reading into a buffer, and literal string search uses Boyer-Moore strstr while Regex search utilizes PCRE’s JIT compiler.
Other aspects contributing to its speed are benchmarking each revision to detect performance regressions and profiling using Valgrind and gprof and calling pcre_study() before the same regex execution.
Another impressive feature of The Silver Searcher is that it ignores certain file patterns from the .hgignore and .gitignore. If you don’t want to search some files in the source repository, you can add the patterns of those files to the .ignore extension. Furthermore, it positions all keys on its home row, and the command name is almost 33% shorter when you compare it to Ack.
Sourcegraph
Sourcegraph allows you to search code from more than a million open-source repositories. While searching, you can enable or disable case sensitivity, regular expressions, and structure search from the search field. You can also copy the full query.
The tools help you search your repository without regex or escaping and review commits with more speed than grep and git log. In addition, you can also filter code by different attributes like language.
To this day, 800k+ developers have used Sourcegraph for various purposes. It includes finding things fast in multiple repositories, navigating with references and definitions, making code changes, and integrating your code with different services.
Sourcegraph can work seamlessly with your infrastructure, code, and tools. It supports:
Repositories like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, etc.;
Programming languages like Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP, Go, C, C++, C#, Ruby, Scala, Kotlin, Perl, JSON, Groovy, etc.;
Tools like Chrome, Firefox, Jira, Sentry, Datadog, JetBrains, Atom, npm, etc.
Krugle
Enter a query in Krugle’s search field to start hunting for your code. It will show you the result from thousands of open-source projects based on the code pattern you enter. The tool also lets you browse projects and perform an advanced search.
This leading source code search engine effectively locates the code without giving you a hard time. It supports collaboration tools that can interact with each other and with source code. And you can also share the code with your team of developers or other users and designers.
Krugle also allows programmers to identify source code with data needed to assess, fix, and deploy the code. It, in fact, is a complete solution for enterprises with teams consisting of 1 to 10000+ members for software development.
Google Code Search
Code Search by Google is a public code search engine tool to help developers explore code, eliminating the need to download its source. You can use it in open-source projects like Android and Chromium.
This tool supports various filters, syntax options, keyboard shortcuts, and operators. It lets you perform a search for code snippets or specific files by offering a simple search that you can find on the top of its user interface.
By default, all searches in Code Search utilize RE2 regular expressions. But you can also take an alternative path instead of regex by enclosing your search keywords in a double quote mark, i.e. (“). In addition, it also offers cross-references for specific repositories, and upon enabling the cross-references, symbols link to their respective definitions.
While searching, you can use filters such as:
class:
comment:
file:
content:
function:
lang
symbol:
usage:
Furthermore, it supports programming languages, including C++, C, Java, Kotlin, Python, JS, Go, HTML, JSON, curl, PHP, Ruby, YAML, and Rust. In addition, you can use operators like OR and AND for searching and multiple keyboard shortcuts.
Automation Tools
Modern software development involves automation in different stages, from source code analysis, checking for errors, and testing to packaging and deployment. That is how automation tools become handy for programmers to save more time and increase productivity without wasting time on repetitive tasks.
Automation tools can perform tasks with higher efficiency and speed, without errors and human intervention. So, here are two automation tools to try out.
AutoHotkey
AutoHotkey is an easy-to-learn and powerful automation scripting language that is built for Windows. This open-source and free tool allows you to easily create scripts from small to complex for different types of tasks like macros, auto-clicking, fillers, and more.
This automation tool makes it effortless to create simple hotkeys in a few lines of code. You can define hotkeys for keyboard and mouse, autocorrect replacements, and remap buttons or keys. In addition, it comes with easy-to-learn built-in commands, which is helpful for beginners.
Even experienced developers would love this fully-fledged automation scripting language due to its fast prototyping and support for small projects. Leverage the freedom of automating multiple tasks as it is fast, lightweight, and works out-of-the-box.
Furthermore, AutoHotkey has a flexible and simple syntax that allows you to concentrate on your task without worrying about every little technicality. Apart from supporting the imperative procedural paradigm, AutoHotkey supports command-based and object-oriented programming. It includes simple objects or arrays, short GUI, and hotstrings and hotkeys.
Macro Recorder
Forget about repeating tasks; use Macro Recorder to automate all those tedious processes on your computer system. It captures keystrokes and mouse events just like the way a tape recorder does for infinite replay.
Macro Recorder has a built-in macro editor that lets you review your rearrange actions, recordings, change pauses, and edit your keyboard inputs. Additionally, it repeats your recordings as many times as you need to save you from all those repetitive tasks.
You can also adjust the playback speed and edgy mouse actions. Macro Recorder is a smart tool to find a click position using the image and OCR text recognition instead of static X/Y coordinates. Even if the buttons shift due to ads on web pages, it can find the correct spot, which helps accelerate macro automation.
Macro Recorder can capture the size and position of program windows appearing while recording. It can also set your system on autopilot to perform tasks infinitely. In addition, it supports Mac and Windows and lets you automate various applications that these operating systems support.
Moreover, the tool is easy to use for everyone in the team, not just programmers. Additionally, it works as a web recorder that helps you automate actions in your web browser. Another impressive feature – it’s perfect for automated software testing.
By connecting Macro Recorder with PhraseExpress – their productivity solution, you can get a complete automation suite with capabilities like sharing macros in your network, scheduling automation, triggering macros by entering text shortcuts, or pressing hotkeys.
Conclusion
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