Hacking like a hacker on a Mac using iTerm2, tmux, emacs, irssi (and more).

2011-07-31T00:00:00-07:00

Hacking like a hacker on a Mac using iTerm2, tmux, emacs, irssi (and more).

Those are the softwares I use everyday to try to suck less during my hacking sessions. I found that staying inside a terminal and keeping both hand on the keyboard using my ten fingers increased my productivity.

iTerm2

You probably know or use iTerm, but did you know iTerm2 ? It’s an awesome terminal replacement for Terminal.app, and ships with pane splitting, themes, powerful keybinding, window hotkeying (goodbye Visor!) … A quick glance at its features should definitely convince you.

Emacs

Pretty easy to install using MacPorts or homebrew. Vim is good too. Using one or the other is mostly a matter of taste. By using the default keybindings, Vim users will find themselves hitting frequently the Esc key, whereas Emacs users have to befriend with Ctrl and Alt keys.

Emacs can be used either from inside the terminal or in GUI mode. We are talking about running Emacs inside iTerm2 here ! Run “emacs -nw” to shut down that GUI.

tmux

GNU screen on vitamins. Long story short, tmux is to screen what iTerm2 it to Terminal.app. More configurable, overall improvements … The folks at Hawkhost wrote a two-part tutorial on the why’s and the how’s of tmux.

irssi

IRC in your ~~terminal~~ iTerm2. More on this tutorial by Quadpoint.org.

Bonus

You can also use Solarized, a theme designed for terminal and GUI usage, declined for almost every existing editor/IDE and Oh my zsh, a community-driven framework to manage your zsh configuration.

Solarized

Solarized is a sixteen color palette (eight monotones, eight accent colors) designed for use with terminal and gui applications. It has several unique properties. I designed this colorscheme with both precise CIELAB lightness relationships and a refined set of hues based on fixed color wheel relationships. It has been tested extensively in real world use on color calibrated displays (as well as uncalibrated/intentionally miscalibrated displays) and in a variety of lighting conditions.

Download it for your favorite editor/IDE (vim, emacs, textmate) on the website of its creator, Ethan Schoonover

Oh my zsh

A community-driven framework for managing your zsh configuration. Includes 40+ optional plugins (rails, git, OSX, hub, capistrano, brew, ant, macports, etc), over 80 terminal themes to spice up your morning, and an auto-update tool so that makes it easy to keep up with the latest updates from the community.

Fork it from Robby Russel’s github repository. Steve Losh details his configuration and Intridea has a pretty good explanation of the setup and some tips for a homebrewed configuration.

Giving back to the open source community, one step at a time

2011-07-24T00:00:00-07:00

Giving back to the open source community, one step at a time

One thing at a time, all things in succession. J.G. Holland

I have been excited by the open source world since 6 years. And it’s never been that easy to contribute, especially with popular social coding like github or bitucket. Now I reached a point where I feel the need to give back to the community, but on a more regular and serious basis.

Two years ago I translated missing chapters of the PHP documentation. I was an avid user of PHP at that time, and the lack of french documentation for important chapters like inheritance or serialization encouraged me to submit new translations to help the french community.

Now, as an Erlang intern at the awesome start-up 2600hz, I work on the next-gen open source telecom platform Whistle. Whistle is cool, it’s written in Erlang and open source, so check us out on github !

There are no little contributions, whether it’s to maintain a blogging activity or to participate to an open source project. Every effort is welcomed, Rome wasn’t build in a day. It’s better to take small steps at the beginning to not feel overwhelmed by the task. A good solution is to split the job in small chunks, rather than trying to do everything at once and doing nothing in the end. Who said procrastinating?

The first step is the creation of this blog. It’s a simple static blog generated by jekyll and hosted on GitHub pages. The template design is forked from Tom Preston-Werner’s blog. Speaking of Tom (co-founder of GitHub), an interesting reading on his blog is Blogging like a hacker, which is one of my main motivation to stay lean for my blogging software solution.

The second step is the translation of the famous git ready blog. This blog has been very useful to my git learning, so this is a good project to come back and help. It’s so easy to fork it and translate it thanks to GitHub, that I feel this is a good beginning and almost a no brainer so I jumped straight into it. My first pull request for the french version was sent today, I hope it will make it.

Edouard Swiac

Hacking like a hacker on a Mac using iTerm2, tmux, emacs, irssi (and more).

Hacking like a hacker on a Mac using iTerm2, tmux, emacs, irssi (and more).

iTerm2

Emacs

tmux

irssi

Bonus

Solarized

Oh my zsh

Giving back to the open source community, one step at a time

Giving back to the open source community, one step at a time