Top 10 Productivity Tools for Developers Revealed!

Being a software developer comes with a lot of responsibilities, sleepless nights, deadlines, and work pressure. But thanks to our other fellow developers that they have created tons of great productivity tools for Developers to save time and effort to cope up with all of it. A lot of productivity with developers is about sheer willpower and anti-procrastination hormones in their bodies. But over that, there are some very efficient productivity apps out there specially designed for developers to make their jobs easier. We will be discussing some of those apps in this listicle.

Habitica

Are you into Role-playing games? If yes, this app is the perfect productivity app for you. People are so much into games these days that they find it easier to succeed and live a productive life if they take real life as a game too. With Habitica, you become the lead character of the game of life and get rewarded and punished depending on your completion or procrastination of tasks. This app works even better if you’re working in teams as you can compete with other players and make productivity even more fun. Whenever you complete a task or move closer towards your goal, you get rewards in points that you can use to buy animals and weapons. It is also designed in a very old-school pixel format which makes it more interesting. 

It helps you divide your overall tasks into daily tasks, habits, and other to-dos so it becomes easier to track your progress in every direction. You can also create a group quest if you are starting a team project, add all the tasks that are needed to be done, divide it into teams like backend, front-end, design, etc. If you are not doing your assigned task well, the whole team will take damage on your behalf, so it helps you be more responsible about your work too. It’s a great way to trick yourself into being productive and work hard towards your goals. 

The Silver Searcher

This is a must-have for all coders. Especially, if you are someone who writes very messy code and is not used to place your code elements neatly, this can be a very helpful app. There have been various times where we are trying to search a specific part of our code amongst the thousands of lines, in the end, we just get frustrated and shut down the PC. Well, the Silver Searcher will save you all that trauma. It will help you find any specific line of your code in seconds. It is similar to ACK, however, it is much faster. And the results are much more relevant too. It is lovingly called as Ag among the community, it is a very hand tool to save your time and finish your code well in time. 

Waka Time

Have you heard of Rescuetime? The app that helps you to track your phone usage, and gives you a report on what apps you are using for how much time. Waka time is a similar app but is specially designed for developers. This application will help you understand how much time do you spend programming. Well not just that, it will tell you the exact time you spend on a particular file or branch, the language you write in, the operating system you are using, etc. Coders can use this to analyze their time distribution and what is taking them more time. 

Waka time also offers a Leaderboard option that can help you track the progress of your colleagues and compete with them. All your teammates can get on the Leaderboard and see who ranks higher in terms of total coding time, tasks done, languages written in, etc. So along with being a time tracking app, it can also act as a fun competition stage for your team. If you club this app with another one like Clockify it can help you get a very clear idea about the progress of the projects. 

Soundtrack.net

Did you know the background music for most games is designed to stimulate your brain cells and help you focus on the game better? Well, a lot of programmers like to listen to some kind of music when they’re working and it scientifically helps. Sundtrack.net is a great app that has tons of great game soundtracks which you can listen to while coding. They even have movie and TV show soundtracks if you are interested in that. 

There are also other apps available like Rainy Mood which can provide white noise music like the sounds of rain, or sounds of birds chirping, a lot of people find that calming during coding. 

Intellij Idea

This app is your perfect Coding partner. It is the Grammar.ly of the Coding world. This Java IDE will assist you while you’re coding in every step of the way. Are you stuck and trying to find errors in your code? It will help you with suggestions and quick fixes. It also provides you with a variety of keyboard shortcuts to make your work easier. It also helps you with smart code completion after you let it analyze your previous projects, this is a big time saver. It can also find connections between your various projects and the languages used. 

It also helps you with tasks like running queries, running tests, building tools, decompile, manage schemes, etc. You can download it on Linux, Mac, and Windows. 

Clockify

Another great time management app for programmers. Clockify is perfect for you if you are getting paid on an hourly basis or if you are freelancing. You can count the number of hours that you spend on a project, as well as calculate your payroll and billable hours within the app. Clockify also gives you daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly reports to track your progress. 

This app also allows you to manually create a timesheet with the free timesheet calculator and list different coding activities and figure out how much time you spent on each. For Mac users, the app also has the provision to apply the Pomodoro clock, so if you are interested in that blocking chunks of time technique, you can give that a go. 

If you have a gamer’s mindset, you can even make work a little more interesting by adding an estimated time in which you will complete a task and try to beat the clock. It is a free app, with a simple interface, you can try it out! 

Also Read: 10 Excellent Clockify Alternatives (Features, Pricing, Ratings)

F.lux

In the hectic life of a programmer, sometimes (most times) it becomes hard to catch a break or even maintain a healthy work-life balance. Programmers spend hours at a stretch working on a program in front of their screens. And a lot of programmers have the habit of pulling off all-nighters in order to complete a project. It is very important to protect those dry tired and overworked eyes. This is where F.lux comes into place. This app adjusts the brightness of your screen and adds warm or cool filters to it depending on the time of the day and also the location. Isn’t that cool. 

So as the night approaches your screen will automatically turn into a warm yellow shade. These color filters will help your eye muscles relax and help you work for a longer time. 

MantisBT

Finding bugs in your program is a real task and sometimes it gets very frustrating. MantisBT is a very helpful program to track your bugs for you. It will find faults in your software and send you an email about it. You can also configure this app into working as a project management tool too. Plus, you can decide what type of errors do you want this app to report. This app also helps you keep a track of all the issues so you can, later on, cross-check and analyze the changes you made with ease. Mantis also takes an extra step and helps you analyze if the issues in your code are somehow connected and it also provides you with a graph to understand the relationship between them. 

Auto Hotkey

We all know the importance of shortcuts and the amount of time it saves us. Auto Hotkey basically doubles and triples the effect of shortcuts. If you are a programmer, the keyboard is almost an instrument to you and you need to play it well. Hotkey makes it easier for you. It basically makes a note of all the actions in your program that you are prone to repeat and then automates it for you. It smoothens the process of coding by managing different files, folders, and windows. You can also use this app for aiding Graphic User Interface testing. You may take a little time to get a hang of this app, but you can always start with some basic commands and then move your way up. Once you are well equipped with the app you will save tons of time and effort. 

Sublime Text

Last but not least. This is a favorite amongst many and quite essential. This cross-platform code editor supports most programming languages and makes coding a lot easier. With this code editor, you can easily navigate through lines, switch between different projects and make changes to multiple elements together. 

It also provides a distraction-free mode where the window will take up the entire screen so that you are less likely to open your internet browser and get distracted. The interface of this app is very user-friendly and it’s color-coded tabs help you understand your own code better. 

So there you go, a list of some great apps online to make you a better developer and increase your productivity. However, it is very important to realize and remember that true productivity comes from raw will power and focus. And to make sure your productivity is at its level best, it is also important to make sure you are stepping out of your closed workspace and getting some fresh air every day! If you have any app suggestions from your side that make you a better programmer, do mention it in the comments. Best of luck.