A few weeks ago, my good old friend Dave (Emphasis on "old"), was bragging about how Textmate for the Mac was such an awesome editor that could do fancy things like write half your code for you, cutting your development time down drastically. I thought nothing of it. So what if I get carpal tunnel syndrome. By the time that happens I'll be paying smarter, younger people to write code for me. :) Secretly though, I was jealous. Why do Mac users get to have all the cool stuff?
Anyway, I suppressed my feelings of inadequacy and continued with the repetitive stress, busily getting my company ready for launch this fall. As is usually the case, my chi lead me to a Linux alternative. In the process of researching something else, I stumbled upon instructions for turning my Gnome text editor "gedit" into a more powerful development tool.
The "snippets" plug-in was there the whole time, waiting to save me keystrokes. All I had to do was turn it on. Edit > Preferences > Plugins Tab Check the snippets box and also the File Browser Pane for good measure. You'll have to have gedit and the plugins package installed of course. Now you'll have fast access to common functions for a wide variety of programming languages. Plus you can add your own snippets for common functions and code you use in your work.
If anyone has a set of Drupal 5.x or 6.x snippets for gedit I'd love to hear from you. Of course, I'll be working on my own and when I have a decent set, I'll post it here. My clients thought I was fast before! Wait till they get a load of me now. :D Happy(er) coding.