a timocracy of one

Over at Pivotal they recently blogged about the typical wrist problems that plague developers. In one of the comments someone mentioned a solution a number of us have come across at some point, mousing left-handed. When I have wrist problems (and a number of colleagues have confirmed the same) it tends to be in the right wrist. My problems come from mousing too much, rather than typing. This is aggravated by the fact that the numpad on full-sized keyboards is typically on the right side since people 10-key with their dominant hand. This setup pushed the mouse hand even further out of ergonomic alignment, though.

On the other hand, the layout is perfect for mousing left handed: the mouse starts closer to the optimal hand position and you can enter numbers while mousing. It does take some serious adjustment if you have been using computers for your whole life, but that is actually an added bonus – it gives you additional incentive to work on your mouseless operation while you are stuck in the awkward adjustment period. If you stick with it for a while, you will remap your brain enough, though. And, just like learning to brush your teeth with either hand, the flexibility is useful, for now you can flip-flop as needed to even out the wrist strain.

The new Apple flat (wired version) is perfect for that, since it returns to the tradition of a USB port on either side of the keyboard, for plugging in the mouse and/or another device.

• Run tests – command-r runs the current test file
• Run focused unit!!!! – command-shift-r runs the test your cursor is in.
• The TODO bundle – ctrl-shift-t compiles all your #FIXME #TODO and #CHANGED comments into a pretty little list
• goto file – command-t – a smart, easy, and quick way to go to a given file.
• wrapping/unwrapping – a variety of shortcuts and menu items to combine/un-combine lists of items, wrap text in delimeters, etc.

I’ve come across a number of these, but here is my favorite (put this in your .profile):

function ql()
{
qlmanage -p "$@" >& /dev/null
}

I don’t like how people are backgrounding it or trying to get fancy, primarily, because any of the scripts claiming to make the spacebar-kills-QL functionality work, didn’t. This way CTRL-C does what it should, instead. It also maintains the qlmanage functionality of slideshowing multiple params.

Be careful when you paste it to convert curly quotes back to straight quotes. >:|

Finally. I had been installing wine using MacPorts, just so I could run the ies4linux script. I ran into some problems with that on Leopard, namely that the wine port was broken for Leopard. But now Mike Kronenberg is maintaining current Darwine builds, and has made a graphical installer for ies4linux, on OS X. From the bottom of my heart, thank you Mike.

The wine port (MacPorts) for version 0.9.49 for Leopard is broken and fails with a

./crtdll.spec:44: external symbol 'CRTDLL__basemajor_dll' is not a function

There is a bug in their Trac about it, if you have an account.

I’ve written about improved bash completion in OS X before, but when setting up a iMac at my new job (more on that later), I couldn’t recall what I did for tab completion of rake tasks (which is really nice to have if you do much rails work). This time around, I just dropped Lee Marlow’s Rake Command Completion Using Rake into a scripts folder in my home directory, named it rake-completion.rb, and added

complete -C /Users/timconnor/scripts/rake-completion.rb -o default rake

into my .profile (or .bashrc or .bash_login, etc).

If you use one of the ruby completion scripts (like Lee’s) make sure not to drop it in your bash_completion auto-added folder (/opt/local/etc/bash_completion.d/) as that will choke, expecting a bash script, instead of a ruby one.

Safari redirects feeds to its internal pretty handling with the feed: protocol. If you are working with a local test domain, such as http://test/yourfeed.rss you’ll have problems. In this case, Safari adds a www. and a .com, which is a problem, since you probably aren’t serving the same content up at http://www.test.com/yourfeed.rss. I am not sure if it’s always the case, but it additionally hard to track down in my case, because somehow when it choked Safari ended up redirecting to http://yourfeed.rss without any domain.

I have filed a bug with Apple, but until then I am adding a ServerAlias for the www.com version of my dev domains in Apache config, as a work-around. And for some reason adding www.test.com in the NetInfo Manager doesn’t work, so I added it to my /etc/hosts file.

While Parallels is awesome and all, for web developers, I got tired of having to run a whole VM at all times for testing. I decided to see if I could get IE running through WIne, and just use my Parallels install for a final browser test. I basically followed these directions. with a couple additions:

• X11 wasn’t running my .bash_login, so I moved the entire file to .bashrc, and then made a new one that sourced (“source ~/.bashrc”) so that both the OS X terminal and X1 got all my bash set-up stuff.
• I added “export DISPLAY=localhost:0.0” to my new .bashrc
• I copied the contents of my Basecamp/Parallels install font folder to my ”.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts/”

So now I can just run IE through X11 for my day to day testing. I didn’t get IE7 running, because the betas of that had some issues on OS X, but when they have it polished I’ll give it another shot.

After a little while running OS X, it got harder and harder to bring myself to fire up the ‘fox. Safari looks better on OS X, and just seems to run less bloated. Firefox has enough developer friendly extensions that of course I’ll always have it around for when I hit a DOM/css problem, and it’s useful for triangulating the web standards – if it works in Safari and FireFox, it’s good enough until I get to final browser tweaks and have to fire up Parallels.

There is one reason, everything else aside, that I’d continue to find FF a pain on the Mac, as anything else than a last ditch development tool, though: the stupid legacy choice about which modifier key opens in a new tab. Firefox follows the IE lead about adding http:// and .com if you hit enter in the address field, while holding down the primary modifier (CTRL on PC and Command on Mac), so as to make it easier on ex-IE users. That means you have a different modifier for opening in a tab based on wether you are clicking a link or typing in the address bar. Alt (option on Mac), is the “download this link” modifier when using a mouse, and “open in tab” in the address bar. Even though I use a 3-button mouse it’s still damn annoying to have to remember to use the “download” modifier, if I am using the address or search bar. And I can’t seem to find any way to change it – DAMN annoying (and stupid).

Thus yet another reasons that Safari just makes me happy.

TextMate may not be an obtrusive, in-your-face, I’ll do that for you”, IDE in the style Visual Studio, but the more I use it the more I like it. I think it fits the Mac better, somehow, both the pretty-side and the *nix roots – it’s like vim or emacs with a pretty gui. I could go on about all it’s little not readily apparent niceties that you discover as you start to use it, and I might over time, but first….

After getting QuickSilver set-up I’v been trying to rely on my mouse less. After a bit of that I was still constantly using the mouse for one particular task in TextMate, which lead me to a question: how to activate project drawer via keyboard?

CTRL-TAB will switch you back and forth between the drawer and the editor. Combine that with option-command(aka open apple)-[right|left] arrow for tab switching and you hardly need your mouse.