Tools

Last week I started reading JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford. It was on my list of long overdue things to do. While reading it, I wanted to be able to kick some simple JavaScript examples around. As rubyist we have it good, irb let's us fire up an interactive console anytime we want. But with JavaScript, options are limited. Sure you could install Johnson/EnvJS, Rhino or some other JavaScript engine. Maybe even load up firebug or the web...

I've been a TextMate user for a long time now and I'm still finding new things to do with it. Here recently I wanted to use the RubyAMP TextMate Bundle and was a little miffed to find that it was pointing to my OS X system ruby. The error message looked something like this when it went looking for my ruby/gems. No such file to load -- appscript (LoadError) from /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in `gem_original_require’ /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in `require’ ... My problem is that I...

Upon downloaded the Cutting-Edge version (1.5.4 r1311) of TextMate yesterday, I was happy to find a halloween surprise. How cool can one program be - thanks Allan! Especially to some of your latest work on extending the dialog features for bundle developers.

After being exposed to using TextMate for all my normal text editing needs, I soon began to do more things than just simple GREP-based search and replace functions. I actually started to look at code more often. Within a few short months, I had gone away from my established norm of the happenstantial viewing of simple CSS, HTML and PlainText files to a ful-time lookey lou of languages such as Ruby, XML, PHP, SQL or any number of configuration files...

About a year ago a fellow co-worker of mine was raving that I should learn VIM from the command line interface (CLI) so that I could use it for all my text editing needs. My co-worker at the time was (and probably still is) the Systems Administrator and Lead Application Developer for a company that sold cheap discount software. During my tenure there I served as the Marketing Manager and as such, many of my projects to completely overhaul their...