Many years ago when I was in college, a friend taught me something that’s been really useful for my whole career. That lesson was to let the computer do it for you. Unless there’s a compelling reason to do things the hard way, just let the computer make things easier for you.
Learning lisp? Get a plugin for your text editor or a simple IDE like Dr Racket that matches your parens for you.
Working with fixed width files? Get Record Editor, it’ll save you so much time!
Fighting with javascript? Get WebStorm! Seriously, it’s freaking amazing.
If you have to do something tedious and fiddly, get the computer to help you. That’s what it’s good at. There is a tool out there that will make your life easier, you just have to go and look for it. The hard part is remembering to go look for it :)
It’s normal to think that if there was a tool you could use your teacher or your boss or someone on your team would have told you about it, but thinking to look for tools like that is surprisingly unusual. And to be fair, it can be a real timesink to try tool after tool just to find out none of them are better than what you’re already using.
That said, if someone on your team hasn’t already told you that they’ve tried everything they could find (and searched for tools recently), it’s worth doing at least a little Googling and seeing if there’s already a tool that would make your life easier. Other people use lisp, you can safely assume there are tools out there for it. Other people use fixed width files, you can safely assume there are tools for those too. And tons of other people use javascript, tools for that are getting better all the time.
If there isn’t already a tool, you might be able to build one. That’s exactly what bash or powershell scripting is for – fiddly things that humans are bad at and tedious but simple things that humans just don’t wanna do. If you’ve ever run a build script, you’ve used a custom tool that someone wrote to automate building your application so it gets done the exact same way every single time. No matter what OS you’re running, there will be other scripts out on the internet that you can take apart to build your own custom tools.
Whether you find tools or build your own, remember that boring stuff is the computer’s job!