I find the volume of overwhelming, but I think I have a practice now that works well for me. Say I want to do something in vim, but it feels clunky. Part of me says "there may be a better way to do this", and I go looking for a way. I usually limit such a search to ten minutes or so. I'll stretch that if I'm getting closer.

It's not a hard science, but I think the two important elements are 1. Being willing to deep dive and 2. Monitoring how much time I spend to allow for reasonable stops. I come back to unsolved issues when they come up repeatedly. That tells me those are more important.

My personal process has a lot of parallels with "lazy" or "short-circuit" evaluation and "greedy" algorithms.

First, remembering the fact that certain information is out there is a lot easier to remember than the actual details of that information. Bits like "zsh has this crazy advanced globbing syntax that obsoletes many uses of `find`" or "ssh can do a proxy/tunneling thing and remote-desktop things with the right options, also it sometimes doesn't need to create a login session and sometimes it does" or "ffmpeg has these crazy complex video filters that allow you to do real cool tricks (therefore maybe the same for audio filters though I haven't actually read about that yet)".

Some of this is man pages, some of this is blog posts or stackoverflow answers. I keep my bookmarks well-organized using tags (in Firefox, Chrome doesn't seem to have tagged bookmarks for some reason, last time I checked). Whenever I find something that seems it may be useful some day, I bookmark it, tag it properly and sometimes I add a few keywords to title that I am likely to search for when I need the info.

Then, given the knowledge that some information is out there, I allow myself to look it up whenever.

I've never been very good at rote memorization, at least not doing it on purpose. I often lack the motivation to muster up the will and focus required. So I don't force myself, but somehow still remember stuff any way.

There's so many tiny things in such a wide field of interests, I don't even really want to memorize all :) So I cut it down to knowing the existence of information (and sometimes, classes of information).

Then maybe some day I'm working with some particular features of ssh or git, and I notice myself looking up the same commands or switches a few times over again. So apparently I'm not memorizing these. Then, I make a note. That's not a very organized system, it can be a post-it, a markdown/textfile, an alias, a shellscript, a code comment, a github gist. I used to try and keep one textfile with "useful commands and switches and tricks and and and", but I found myself never looking at it, so I stopped doing that. Instead I try to put the note somewhere I'm likely to come across when I need it in context.

The way Sublime Text just remembers the content of new untitled textfiles and then allows you to organize these groups of files into projects, quick-switch between projects using ctrl-alt-P, is just perfect (or shall I say, "sublime"?). It allows a random short note evolve organically from temporary scratch to a more permanent reference note.

I also download some reference manuals, so I have access offline, which is often significantly faster to quickly open, check and close. For instance there's a link to the GLSL 4 spec in my start menu, which instantly opens in katarakt by just pressing "alt-F1, down, right, enter" -- a leftover from a project where I was reading that thing all the time. After a while I added a shorter webpage-converted-to-markdown reference to the sublime project file, and now I use it less.

I guess the shorter summary is: Yes I do have tips, but they are what work for myself, but the more generally applicable advice is: yes there are tips and there are tricks and they are whatever works by any means necessary, but most importantly: yes, there are tips and tricks, and some of them will work for you too! :)