I’m a big fan of the keyboard. Minimizing time between thought and action helps me flow. Vim helps me do this, as do keyboard driven utility apps like LaunchBar. For everything else I rely on keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately, it’s easy to forget a shortcut, and mousing through the menu is slow and clunky. So, here’s my all time favorite OSX keyboard shortcut: Shift + CMD + /. This is the universal shortcut to toggle an application’s help menu. Not only can you search for application help topics, but menu items are also returned.
Now, you can quickly launch the action and be on your way. But if you take a moment to hover over the menu item, you will be shown where in the menu it can be found along with its keyboard shortcut.
It’s like an internal command launcher for each application. Plus, you can see the keyboard shortcut for next time and skip the help menu altogether. Enjoy!
Recently, another Obtivian, Scott Parker, joined my team at a client. Since this meant we’d be pairing a lot, I thought we should experiment and see how the Pomodoro Technique worked for us pairing. Overall, I’ve really enjoyed using it and wanted to share some of my thoughts.
Disclaimer - When it comes to productivity boosting techniques, I’m not dogmatic. Instead, I’ll figure out the core ideas and fit them into my work flow comfortably. Try, assess, and adjust.
So far, it’s been working well for us. I recommend giving it a try. Experiment. Tweak. And if it’s not working, drop it.
Homebrew is package management system for OS X designed to automatically tune build configurations for your system. No more fumbling with compile flags. No more mucking up your $PATH with various installation locations. Just use ‘brew install package_name’ and let Homebrew handle the rest.
I recommend installing Homebrew as a git repo in /usr/local. I’ll cover some benefits of this later.
$ cd /usr/local $ git init $ git remote add origin git://github.com/mxcl/homebrew.git $ git pull origin master $ sudo chown -R `whoami` /usr/local
The last command is to eliminate the need of sudo when installing a new formula.
Here are some of the key folders in the Homebrew directory:
(not tracked by git)
Initially, this contains only the brew executable (for installing and maintaining packages). When a package is installed, a symbolic link is created here which points to the executable in the package installation
(not tracked by git)
Packages are installed in their own folder here. (e.g.- /usr/local/Cellar/mysql/5.1.41/). Different versions are separated into sub folders. This way, you can have multiple versions of the same package built and ready for use. Just change the destination of the link in bin/ to point to a different version.
This folder contains all of the Homebrew formulae. Each formula is a Ruby class which uses a DSL to craft the package build recipe. As of this writing, there are 469 formulae that come in the default Homebrew package. If your desired formula is unavailable, check Github or add your own.
So far, so good. I have built every package that has previously given me problems (i.e.- mysql, postgres, imagemagick). I thought I would try something a little more obscure: MacVim.
Error: No available formula for macvim
Denied…Github to the rescue!
I could take the lame route by pasting this to a file in my local Formula folder, but lets show off how easy Github+git makes sharing code.
First, I setup d0k’s fork as a remote git repository in my homebrew repo
$ git remote add mac_vim git://github.com/d0k/homebrew.git
Now, I can fetch all of d0k’s changes not in my homebrew repo (remember, fetch pulls down the changes but does not merge them in).
$ git fetch mac_vim
Using cherry-pick, I can apply the single MacVim commit to my local repo. All I need is the SHA (accessible via Github or logs). In the master branch, execute:
$ git cherry-pick 1dd0594acbe80b52d26175c2ae97314967a02f06
That’s it! Git automatically knows which branch based off the SHA and commits that change to my current branch.
Now,
$ brew install macvim
Recently, I decided to play around with Boson, a framework for organizing and executing Ruby. Commands can be executed from both irb and the command line. Check out the link above as there is a lot of customization available to craft exactly the command library you want.
For example, let’s say I want to post a tweet from the command line. I create the following module and place it in ~/.boson/commands/
require 'twitter' # twitter gem
module Twitterr
# module named Twitterr to avoid naming clash with twitter gem
def tweet(message)
httpauth = Twitter::HTTPAuth.new('dev_ajw', 'not_my_password')
client = Twitter::Base.new(httpauth)
client.update(message)
end
end
Now, I can post a tweet from the command line:
or from irb:
So this is pretty cool. Not only can Boson be used to organize helper functions for use in irb, but new command line functions can be written using pure Ruby. Now, if only I didn’t have to type ‘boson’ before each command.
Turns out zsh contains a function similar to Ruby’s method_missing. If you define command_not_found_handler(), this function will be called when a command is not recognized. So I drop this in ~/.zlogin:
command_not_found_handler() {
boson $*
}
and any command not recognized by the shell will be forwarded to Boson. Now, the tweet command can be called directly from the command line:
One possible side effect is the additional time taken to scan the Boson modules for every unknown command. So far, this hasn’t bothered me. I’ll see if things change as my Boson library grows.