Then I asked myself “How am I going to my js files in JSpec while shrinking them through sprockets” ?

The answer is pretty simple :

<script src="http://localhost:3000/sprockets.js"></script>

Just replace your lines that load your js files in dom.html by this one. Obviously, you need to fire up your rails server to run it.

I spent something like two years with Emacs, it was great since I really enjoy Lisp but I never really liked the way the you input the shortcuts, making you holding Ctrl every couple of seconds to do something. Moreover, the way you have to setup it, installing loads of libraries, byte-compiling everything to have something still going fast was fun, but those shitloads of stuff to install can drive you crazy when something goes wrong with your install.

Vim had been my favorite code-editor for most of the time, maybe like five years. It’s clearly an awesome piece of software and was convinced it would be my daily companion until something better come-out. Great plugins, blazing fast editing, tons of colorschemes (yeah I like changing those  two or three times per week, mostly to visually break routine).

And two years ago I got a MacBook, switched from daily C++ development to Rails. Textmate always tickled me, and I finally gave it a try. I loved it. The feeling of having something modern, clean and simple, focusing on just what you need, providing new features like snippets, that cmd -T shortcut to jump to any file, it was just so cool.

But recently, things felt wrong. I’m using it daily for two years now and some details made me realize it’s going nowhere, which is the point in this blog post.

• No window splitting at all
• Scripting it with your favorite language basically means writing a script which will be called by your TM script
• You can crash it just by opening any log file
• Colorschemes are so damn cool nobody tries to create new ones !

But those are minor problems, except for the splitting issue which I really miss. The main problem is :

• Textmate 1 is abandoned.

We’re all waiting for Textmate 2 to came out. But it’s taking ages, and sincerely like its author said, it just another Duke Nukem Forever incarnation. I even doubt it will be released, maybe because if it’s not perfect, its author will be flamed to oblivion by everyone, encouraging him to continue until its perfect. Well, it may not be the case, but currently we have no clue of a potential release date.

To me, Textmate is like a modern vim (ok, it’s not open-source, it sucks, but I can accept that if the tool is really awesome, which is almost the case). No need to look at your keyboard and asking yourself why the fuck it’s ctrl-] to jump on a help subject, it’s just simple. Another cool one : moving around in Vim with jk keys is really nice, but as I still have to use arrows to browse in my cmd history, I can’t get my fingers escaping from those arrows. For sure another shortcut must exist to do that, there are many reasons to excuse this behavior, but it’s still not “great”, it’s just cool.

You’ll probably think by reading this that I’m an unsatisfied programmer who can’t find its editor (which is true) but the point isn’t exactly that. I found my editor of choice. I’m raging against it because :

• Even if they won tons of money while selling Textmate, there’s only one developer. Come on, it’s a code editor, it’s serious business.
• Communication around Textmate 2 is a nice example of worst practices.
• Its author is trapped in that Babylon tower thingy, if he don’t release it, he’ll be smashed by everyone (which is already the case)
• Its author have to release something great or everyone will flame him, write awful frustrated blog posts, Scotty will beam him up to pluto, …
• Learning an editor is an investment, we all know that, and feeling stuck because you can’t help its author to make it great, you can’t do anything at all ’cause its closed-source.
• It feels like I bet and lost.

I’m not blaming its author for its license choices, I’m okay with that, people have to eat, but that implies Macromates have duties too. A big one, update our fucking editor for god’s sake. Writing good stuff then disappearing is the best fucking way to frustrate everyone. Moreover, I’m stucked. Emacs or Vim don’t satisfy me anymore, 20 years old software rocks for stability, but there’s some evolutions we had since I’d like to have in my editor.

Conclusion, there must be a law against selling closed-source editors, I killed thousands of kittens with the troll potential of this blog post.

AddressBook is a library to fetch real addresses from Google Map around a location. I wrote it to craft fake data for a Rails application that used maps to display various models.

Mailtois is my last piece of work I had to do for school before I get graduated. It’s basically something that you plug in your Postfix on incoming messages to parse them. Your mails can now bring code and it can be executed. The main idea was to consume web services from body, like to create automagically tasks on a Redmine instance while assigning work to a co-worker. It’s just a proof-of-concept but it’s still usable.

Acts as a follower is Rails plugin to allow models to follow other models exactly like you would with Twitter. It basically works and provide tests.

Ruba stands for Ruby Backup. My goal here is to create a library that provides an easy way to drive your backups, maybe a DSL, instead of an already written script that is too messy to bend to your own needs. I focus on having minimal prerequisites and to maximize its predictability ( hey it’s gonna toy with your partitions ! ). It’s finally more a script generator than really library, it outputs shell commands than you can execute wherever you want with bundled classes : Local, SSH or whatever you want, meaning you don’t necessarily need to have the Ruby interpeter where you want to backup. `

I also have some forks, where the most interesting is Spree-S3-download. I upgraded it to the last Spree release and corrected some issues.

LOLCAT

These colors allow me to visualize and memorize with ease what I received today, and keep it in mind during the whole day.
I got a pretty good visual memory, providing it colors to glue ideas to is just the best way to fix them in my mind. When my associates and I discuss about a subject, I immediately remember the concerned mail thread, because we’re talking about a “blue” or “green” subject and I can filter in my mind according to it.

Sure there are mailboxes too in Mail.app, but it’s not enough, it’s still different mailboxes and remembering a set of numbers is clearly not efficient as remembering a succession of colors.

Here, at my own little company, we use emails for everything, tasks, notes and even reports. All of these can be solved by using different software but it feels way too much when you’re only three people working. Moreover, the killer feature is simply the search function, which let us search in “everything” we’ve done to hunt down informations, people to talk to, clients, technology. Labels on the results list are like sugar, permitting to visually understand in fraction of second to what this thread belongs to.

The bad part is .. Mail.app felt perfect. Hotkeys are all already in your mind because they are shared by all OSX applications, it’s fast, it’s clean and well integrated … but it lack the killer feature : colored label.

The good part is I finally know what really glue me to GMail so hard. I may have already known this one, but after using it daily during three years, it tends to blur itself.

This all came up while loosing my time with all those GMail captchas which are everywhere in the password recovery process. I thought about using something else instead of raging about GMail cumbersomeness. I fired up Mail.app, configured my account with IMAP and started using it.

First action : activate threads to tame all those emails correctly !
Then, I created some Smart Mailboxes, took a look to hotkeys and started to answer to those shiny emails.

It pretty looks like GMail, except it lacks a way to distinguish visually in which mailboxes threads are, like labels color used to. But it’s blazing fast, less clunky and look nicer. Mutt is clearly the fastest, but out of my needs. Spending months configuring it is something I gave up with years ago, mostly when I decided to spend my time using software, not just studying it in every angle possible.

But it’s still day one, let’s see if it’s just a “I’m hunger of new stuff” or if I’m leaving Google’s church for real.