TIL

I use Vim’s spell feature when writing blog posts. Very often, the first suggestion it makes is the one that I choose. Consider a word like ‘Rubysit.’ My dictionary contains the word ‘Rubyist’ (naturally) and that’s what Vim spell is going to suggest to me first. For transposition errors like this I’d like to skip the word picker when possible. To automatically choose the first suggestion, in normal mode put your cursor over the word and type 1z=.

To hide the bookmarks bar in Google Chrome: Press CMD + SHIFT + B on Mac Press CTRL + SHIFT + B on Windows This shortcut toggles the bookmarks bar on or off. ...

Something I took for granted at Hashrocket was the file that configures Exhuberant Ctags. Without configuration, recursive tag generation will tag many things and cause problems. overindex badly. Here’s how you configure Ctags to ignore things: /ctags.cnf (on MSDOS, MSWindows only) /etc/ctags.conf /usr/local/etc/ctags.conf $HOME/.ctags $HOME/ctags.cnf (on MSDOS, MSWindows only) .ctags ctags.cnf (on MSDOS, MSWindows only) If any of these configuration files exist, each will be expected to contain a set of default options which are read in the order listed when ctags starts, but before the CTAGS environment variable is read or any command line options are read. This makes it possible to set up site-wide, personal or project-level defaults. Here’s the head of my root .ctags, which even this far in is excluding a lot: ...

From normal mode, N% will jump you to that percentage of the file. So 50% jumps to halfway through the file.

Unused dependencies are bad: they increase the size of your project, slow down processes, require maintenance, and send incorrect messages to fellow developers about what’s important. To get find unused dependencies in Ruby, I’ve been using gem stale: gem stale gem stale list gems along with most recent access times. If the last access time was the day you set up the app, that gem is a candidate for removal.

The longer I program (ahem), the bigger I want my terminal fonts. I think most programmers should be using a bigger font than they are. Complicating matters, the standard font for iTerm is miniscule on a computer monitor. Today I discovered iTerm’s ‘View > Size Changes Update Profile’ feature. When enabled, changes to your font size via ⌘ + and ⌘ - will be applied to your iTerm profile. The next time you open iTerm, the new font size will persist.

Hit K on a keyword, and Vim looks up the program under the keyword. It’s a bit jarring because Vim appears to shell out from your buffer to show the definition. To see that man page in Vim, load the man.vim plugin from command mode or in your .vimrc: :runtime! ftplugin/man.vim Now, you can read man pages as a Vim buffer: :Man curl

“Post-gres-Q-L”, “Post-grey-sequel”, “Postgres”… how do you say it? And where did the name come from? PostgreSQL was originally named POSTGRES– all caps. The name was chosen because it was the successor to the Ingres database developed at UC Berkeley. As the system adopted SQL standards and features, the name was changed to PostgreSQL. From the docs: Many people continue to refer to PostgreSQL as “Postgres” (now rarely in all capital letters) because of tradition or because it is easier to pronounce. This usage is widely accepted as a nickname or alias. ...

Linters are great, except when they aren’t. One example is Rubocop’s BlockLength lint. For example, I don’t care if my RSpec describe and context blocks are too long. Nontrivial test blocks will never be short enough to match a reasonable rule about blocks. I’ve disabled this lint for these blocks with Rubocop’s configuration file: # .rubocop.yml Metrics/BlockLength: IgnoredMethods: ['context', 'describe'] Opting out of just these blocks lets me enforce this rule everywhere else.

Today I learned about the method __id__, aliased object_id, in Ruby. It returns a unique integer identifier for any Ruby object. A few examples: > Object.new.object_id => 7024702983434 > name = "jake" => "jake" > name.object_id == name.object_id => true > "thawed".object_id == "thawed".object_id => false > "frozen".freeze.object_id == "frozen".freeze.object_id => true I’ve never used this method in practice, but I hope to someday.