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Alexander Dickson - Web Developer covering PHP, jQuery / Javascript, XHTML, CSS, more

Making your Stack Overflow experience easier

Published on Thursday, 14th October 2010.

Stack Overflow is a great site for programmers. And some tools out there make the experience that much better!

Despite the trendy shift to Google Chrome, I've stuck by Firefox. I know, I know, she can be a little slow and not play nice with Flash (but who does?), but, she has sure been faithful. I am going to present two must haves for spending some serious time on the site.

Tabinta

Noone likes unformatted code - especially when trying to read it. A web browser typically is an awful place to write code - when tab by default takes you to another element. Some sites have solved the tab in textarea problem - but Stack Overflow has not.

So, I present Tabinta, or Tab in TextArea. It allows you to hit tab to format your code, without having to do 4 space spasms everytime you want a tab.

Comment Reply

Stack Overflow users have adopted the @ style of replying to users much like Twitter. Being an international site, I often found myself retyping exotic names and concentrating extra hard not to misspell them (and offend them). Copy and pasting also takes too much time.

There is a handy Greasemonkey script available that appends a return char (↵) that when clicked prepends their username to the comment textarea to quickly reply to a user.

By default, it does @username:, which I didn't like (the colon that is). You can remove this colon in line 42 of the source (is there a Hitchhiker's Guide joke there?)

I hope these little programs will ease your Stack Overflow experience!

Comments

  • Filipe Matias

    Posted on Tuesday, 7th December 2010 @ 1:46pm.

    Very handy those scripts, thanks for sharing!

  • Russell Dias

    Posted on Sunday, 17th October 2010 @ 4:31pm.

    That Greasemonkey script will sure come in handy. *Downloading now* thanks!

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I'm a web developer from the Sunshine Coast, Australia. more »