How I Hack on PostgreSQL

Today's post by Dimitri Fontaine gave me the idea of writing a blog posting about the tools I use for PostgreSQL development. I'm not saying that what I do is the best way of doing it (and it's certainly not the only way of doing it), but it's one way of doing it, and I've had good luck with it.

What commands do I use? The following list shows the ten commands that occur most frequently in my shell history.

[rhaas pgsql]$ history  | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
 250 git
  57 vi
  31 %%
  25 cd
  24 less
  20 up
  18 make
  13 pg_ctl
  10 ls
   8 psql

Wow, that's a lot of git. I didn't realize that approximately half of all the commands I type are git commands. Let's see some more details.

[rhaas pgsql]$ history  | awk '$2 == "git" { print $3}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
  93 diff
  91 grep
  15 log
  10 commit
   8 checkout
   7 add
   6 reset
   5 clean
   4 pull
   3 branch

As you can see, I use git diff and git grep far more often than any other commands. The most common things I do with git diff are just plain git diff, which displays the unstaged changes in my working tree (so I can see what I've changed, or what a patch I've just applied has changed) and git diff master (which shows all the differences between my working tree and the master branch; this is because I frequently use git branches to hack on a patch I'm working on). A great deal of the work of writing a good patch - or reviewing one - consists in looking at the code over and over again and thinking about whether every change can be justified and proven correct.

git grep does a recursive grep starting at the current directory, but only examines files checked into git (not build products, for example). I use this as a way to find where a certain function is defined (by grepping for the name of the function at the start of a line) and as a way to find all occurrences of an identifier in the code (which is an absolutely essential step in verifying the correctness of your own patch, or someone else's).

As you can also see, my preferred editor is vi (really vim). This might not be the best choice for everyone, but I've been using it for close to 20 years, so it's probably too late to learn something else now. I think Dimitri Fontaine said it well in the post linked above: the best editor you can find is the one you master. Having said that, if you do even a small amount of programming, you're likely to spend a lot of time in whatever editor you pick, so it's probably worth the time it takes to learn a reasonably powerful one.