5:50, Tuesday November 25th, 2003 • feeling enthusiastic • no comments
It's an age old bug bear of mine. I have a tabbed browser, but it opens windows for pages from other apps in new windows. Blows.
Never occurred to me that if I told Safari to just open the new pages in the same window it would be bright enough to open them in new tabs. I assumed it would overwrite the current document like IE does. Safari is bright though. SUPER YAY!
That makes me so happy, no more browser window proliferation. Exposé or no, I really dislike having more than one browser window. Works well with my Vim hack (below) as well.
The net effect is the whenever I hit K in Vim, I get a google search of the keyword under the cursor. By default Vim uses man, which is OK for C hackers, but not so good for Sun Certified Programmers for Java. :-)
BTW, open is a clever OS X program which uses OS X's database of applications to find the right application for whatever you tell it to open. In this case it will fire up Safari. Using it here means that this hack works from both the command line and GUI versions of Vim.
20:54, Monday November 24th, 2003 • feeling enthusiastic • no comments
Under urging from Miles, I've put BBEdit in a drawer and gone over to using Vim as my main editor. I've been using Vim for a while now, but I'm not proficient enough with it to use it as fluidly as I use BB.
I'm trying to learn a bit more now though. I'm kind of trying to resist buying a book. I don't really get along with the interactive help.
Anyway, one thing I found out from the newbiedoc project, was how to set up macros, particularly insert-mode macros:
imap <h1 <h1></h1>2ba
This macro types "<h1></h1>", positions the cursor between the two tags and goes into insert mode. Useful. There's a lot more you can do, Vim supports functions as well, so I'll have to get into those. I wonder if it's possible to do the kind of things that you can do with the Perl regex pattern modifier e. That would be handy. I really need to conquer Vim's regex syntax, I keep tripping up at the moment.
4:56, Monday November 24th, 2003 • feeling thoughtful • no comments
Just reading The Design of Sites, my new web authoring book. The bulk of the book is a bunch of design patterns for web developers, some of which are pretty obvious, others are new to me (at least I've yet to apply them).
Patterns are interesting because they provide simple recipes to solve simple problems, but when you combine several patterns together you can solve much bigger problems. This made me think, is there any limit to this combinatorial approach? Would a site that simply collected and catalogued patterns in all domains be useful? You would carefully structure the pattern input process and provide features for linking to other patterns in the database (including some form of backlinking) and allow users to rate the quality of patterns as they apply them.
Given that nothing is as discrete as we would like to believe, I think that this might be quite a useful site and I may get off my ass and make it. I had a quick look around but all I found was a lot of software patterns and some architecture and web patterns. I started out looking for business patterns. E.g. "I've learnt a lot about the subtleties of my trade, but I'm finding it hard to teach my clients about the subtleties and manage my projects in such a way that means we don't fall into these known traps." I'm not the most amazingly skilled businessman ever and a set of simple small business patterns or freelance patterns could help me out a lot sometimes. It also seems likely to me that a repository that's based around statements of problems would be knowledge in a form that's easily applicable in a way that web browsers tend to like.
1:07, Monday November 24th, 2003 • feeling webmasterly • no comments
aspell -H
Interactive curses spell-checker that is bright enough to avoid flagging HTML tags. Coolness. Got to work out a good way to run it in batch-mode on a whole site next.
