如何高效写作Seven habits of effective text editing

原文链接Seven habits of effective text editing

1. Move around quickly

There are three basic steps:

• While you are editing, keep an eye out for actions you repeat and/or spend quite a bit of time on.
• Find out if there is an editor command that will do this action quicker. Read the documentation, ask a friend, or look at how others do this.
• Train using the command. Do this until your fingers type it without thinking.

2. Don’t type it twice

3. Fix it when it’s wrong

4. A file seldom comes alone

5. Let’s work together

6. Text is structured

7. Make it a habit

• Learning to drive a car takes effort. Is that a reason to keep driving your bicycle? No, you realize you need to invest time to learn a skill. Text editing isn’t different. You need to learn new commands and turn them into a habit.
• On the other hand, you should not try to learn every command an editor offers. That would be a complete waste of time. Most people only need to learn 10 to 20 percent of the commands for their work. But it’s a different set of commands for everybody. It requires that you lean back now and then, and wonder if there is some repetitive task that could be automated. If you do a task only once, and don’t expect having to do it again, don’t try to optimise it. But you probably realize you have been repeating something several times in the last hour. Then search the documentation for a command that can do it quicker. Or write a macro to do it. When it’s a larger task, like lining out a specific sort of text, you could look around in newsgroups or on the Internet to see if somebody already solved it for you.
• The essential basic step is the last one. You can think of a repetitive task, find a nice solution for it and after the weekend you forgot how you did it. That doesn’t work. You will have to repeat the solution until your fingers do it automatically. Only then will you reach the efficiency you need. Don’t try to learn too many things at once. But doing a few at the same time will work well. For tricks you don’t use often enough to get them in your fingers, you might want to write them down to be able to look them up later. Anyway, if you keep the goal in view, you will find ways to make your editing more and more effective.
• One last remark to remind you of what happens when people ignore all the above: I still see people who spend half their day behind a VDU looking up at their screen, then down at two fingers, then up at the screen, etc. - and then wonder why they get so tired… Type with ten fingers! It’s not just faster, it also is much less tiresome. Using a computer program for one hour each day, it only takes a couple of weeks to learn to touch-type.