[WRITING]
(makes writing and coding more fun than stopping!)
TL;DR
Writing is so much more awesome with cool coding toys (but without the stuff that makes coding look intimidating). VSCode + GistPad + Powermode is a great start.
CodeInTheDark started it. A simple contest:
- write a brand new awesome website...
- from scratch...
- in raw HTML and CSS code...
- without ever looking at a preview page...
- in 15 minutes...
- in the dark.
And the audience decides who wins.
Once the sites are finished, that's pretty cool. But with the whole hackathon-meets-TEDx-meets-rave vibe they needed to make coding a wildly exciting spectator sport. And so the Awesome-Power-Mode text editor was born.
Lasers and music filled the air.
Big screens faced the audience.
Peak hacker montage vibes intensified as the stakes got higher, the countdown got lower, and lines of code shook and exploded with greater and greater intensity the faster the competitors typed.
Now there are versions of powermode available for most IDEs and text editors. Some folks have even figured out how to add powermode to any website (hello, Google Docs) or any app (maybe try it in Excel, Notepad, RStudio).
The last few years I've had to switch between typing and dictation fairly regularly (thanks to RSI and squished nerves) so I've used powermode on and off in Atom, ST, PyCharm, and now VSCode. Even when I am 100% voice-coding I keep writing in powermode. For a marathon project (like IDK a PhD dissertation), shorter bingeable challenges like a weekend Hackathon or ShutUpAndWrite, or something habit-forming like like 100DaysOfCode/Art/Kindness or NaNoWriMo, a few fireworks here and there really help me to get started and keep going.
I'm very happy with my simple no-code powermode setup -- VSCode + GistPad + Power Mode. And the brainfog-proof opinionated literature review workflow I've been using is working like a charm. (Especially since I added in all the cool new apps for research discovery, synthesis, and evaluation that have popped up to strengthen and streamline rapid science collaboration over the last couple of years. There's some really cool stuff out there, like ResearchRabbit, OpenKnowledgeMaps, Roam Research, RemNote, Weava, and Scholarcy).The new tools are amazingingly helpful. The possiblities are endless... And just like people, the really awesome apps are even awesomer when they work together.