If you ever feel limited by phpmyadmin, you ought to check out one of the MySQL interfaces available. I personally liked phpmyadmin when I first found it, and was frustrated after working with it for a couple of years. Finding SQLYog (Community Edition is great) was the best thing that’s happened for me regarding MySQL
Usually i keep my screen session open when i leave my office. When i come home and have a glorious idea, i fire up putty, enter screen -R -D and am right where i have left.
Good point, It’s the tiny little utilities that save you that extra bit of time that are often the ones that people don’t know about.
For instance when I was helping a windows server admin who was doing some remote work on an ubuntu server install I noticed that he was fully typing out pathnames when changing directories.
He just didn’t know that you could hit tab in bash to auto-complete, needless to say he spends a lot less time typing now