What tool makes you most productitive?
yan: * Bash shortcuts. Learn ^l, ^r, ^a, ^e, ^w, the substitution syntax (^one^two), bang commands (!cmd, !!, !!:0, !!:1, etc)* Learn a good text editor well. I use vim, but learn whatever you feel comfortable in. Just make sure it doesn't stand in your way.* Learn the core unix commands and use them often (tail, sort, uniq, tee, pushd/popd, etc)* Use a configuration management tool (I use puppet, some people like cfengine, there's also chef)* The second you see yourself doing something for the third time, script it (It goes without saying: learn a decent scripting language well)! Keep typing same long command? Alias or macro it. I can't stress this enough.* Automate builds, tests and all doc generation. Don't repeat yourself. Use your downtime to reduce repetition. See what can be scripted.edit:* Keep everything in source control. Have a 'misc' repo and if you're starting to work on a script just to do some basic maintenance, add it to repo and keep it up to date. You never know when it will grow beyond a toy and you never know if you might break its functionality by messing with it.edit2:What really keeps me productive is liking the work I'm doing. Nothing else comes close.