No actual ranting in this postWhen coding, I often find myself running out of short-term memory. There's a constant need to refer to some code snippet from somewhere, or a bit of documentation explaining what all those weird function parameters do, etc. etc. While having a second monitor helps with keeping stuff like that visible, I also find it quite distracting to shift my eyes across the screen expanse just to pick out a tiny bit of information.
What helps immensely in this situation, is a small text editor sitting at the bottom of the screen (just below the code edit area). On Windows, I use the brilliant DeskPins tool. I pin one of my notepad windows on top with it, and then simply paste anything I need into that. When not needed, the window can be simply minimised.
It looks like this, and works extremely well:
Naturally, this works ideally no matter what set of IDEs and tools I'm using, which is a great bonus. The editor is SciTE, which is the best Notepad replacement in the history if the universe.
