Using Vim

Posted by Andrew Premdas Fri, 24 Dec 2010 09:13:45 GMT

Currently I use textmate as my main editor, but I find myself often using Vim as a secondary editor for small tasks run from the command prompt. I'm thinking about extending my use of VIM for the following reasons

  1. Its available on all the VM's that I have to use
  2. I really like modal editing

However textmate still has a number of very attractive features that I will want VIM to emulate including:

  1. Excellent markdown support
  2. Good cucumber and rspec support
  3. OK RVM support
  4. ctrl-T find file support

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Dotfiles madness

Posted by Andrew Premdas Fri, 24 Dec 2010 07:29:37 GMT

I've been doing alot of machine setup recently, both VM's and a new Mac. This has lead me to think about dotfiles once again, and also to consider using VIM much more. One other thing I've been thinking about doing for a while is using ZSH.

Github has a number of dotfile projects which should make doing this stuff a little bit easier. The idea being that you can clone a repository run a command or two and end up with a kick-ass ninja environment that will instantly make you more productive.

Of course the reality is somewhat different. For starters:

  • which dotfile project do you choose
  • how do you test out this environment
  • how do you roll-back to your productive environment, when blingo-environment-0.2.7 kills you.

My answer to this - and its not pretty - is to use separate accounts to test the environments. However I still have to be able to migrate the environment I like to my main account when I'm finished, so its just not as simple as that.

VirtualBoxing

Posted by Andrew Premdas Tue, 14 Dec 2010 16:08:28 GMT

Been doing alot of this lately, some notes

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Chmod files and directories

Posted by Andrew Premdas Wed, 08 Dec 2010 10:48:56 GMT

Find this really useful and always forget it.

find -type f -exec chmod 666 '{}' \;  # change files
find -type d -exec chmod 777 '{}' \;  # change directories

Working with Yum

Posted by Andrew Premdas Fri, 03 Dec 2010 15:22:51 GMT

As payment for my many sins, I have been forced to work with Centos and Yum recently. For development this is a fantastically sub-optimal combination with Centos repositories being years out of date and Yum being a slight pain. In addition I'm working in a heavily proxy'd environment.

Most of my problems are a result of my ignorance, so I'll stop moaning and document what I've learnt

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