Subersion on the Mac

If you've ever used Subversion (SVN) on Windows, chances are you've used TortiseSVN. (If you haven't, definitely check it out.) It works as an extension to Windows Explorer. What this means, is that you don't have a separate UI for SVN - you do everything in Explorer. I was really struck by how cool this was when I was working on an old project using an old version of Perforce; it seemed barbaric to have to keep switching between the SCM UI and Explorer.

Until recently, there wasn't anything like that for the Mac, at least not anything that was free/open source and that I knew about. Then, along comes SCPlugin. From the web page: "The goal of the SCPlugin project is to integrate Subversion into the Mac OS X Finder. The inspiration for this project came from the TortoiseSVN project."

As of this writing, it's at version 0.7, which means it has a few rough spots, but for the light use I've put it to so far, it's been mostly pretty good. And since it's 0.7, it has nowhere to go but up.

enjoy,
Charles.

Seven Habits of Effective Text Editing - with Vim

I'm a big fan of vim. It's the Unix vi editor with a large number of improvements. The biggest thing I like about it is that it runs pretty much everywhere - Unix/Linux, Mac, and Windows. Having a powerful, familiar editor on Windows was a huge technological leap forward for me when I spent a lot of time on Windows, and it's still very useful on those occasions when I'm "stuck" on Windows.

I recently stumbled across an old article (Nov 2002) from the creator of vim, Bram Moolenaar, that describes how to use vim more effectively. The big thing I learned from it is how to use ctrl-N to complete things like identifiers in programming languages - e.g., type "read" and it expands to "readlines" and offers you a list of other options in your program. Granted, this is old hat for fancy-ass IDEs like Eclipse and Netbeans, but I had no idea that little old vim had it. I guess that's what they mean by vim means "vi-improved."

enjoy,
Charles.