ruby

Not too long ago, I posted a blog entry about 5 reasons for using a virtual machine for Drupal development. At the suggestion of some commentors, I have started looking into using Vagrant to manage my VMs. There is an excellent Drupal Vagrant project that provides a great starting point. This article explains how to begin with that and modify it to suit your own needs.

ttytterRecently I have been using Homebrew to install Open Source tools on my Mac. I find it to be a little more to my taste than MacPorts. But when I wanted to install TTYtter, a small Twitter command-line client, I discovered that Homebrew doesn't yet have a package for TTYtter.

After a quick chat with JohnAlbin, I decided to try building my own Homebrew formula for TTYtter. John has also successfully built a homebrew package or two. He re-assured me that learning the system wasn't going to require a huge investment of my time.

Fifteen minutes later, I committed my new script to the project, and it is now being considered for inclusion in Homebrew's repository. And almost all of the heavy lifting is done by the homebrew toolchain and git.

How easy was it? Well... I simply followed the directions, and moments later had this recipe:

A week ago, I was introduced to Visor, a utility for turning the Mac OS X console into a "Quake-style" console. What does that mean? In a nutshell, it means that the terminal runs not as a normal window, but as a boderless window attached to the top of the screen. Hit a button and the console slides down. Hit the button again (or unfocus from the window) and up it slides. It's a convenient way of keeping a terminal accessible at all times. (And, yes, it supports multiple tabs.)
Visor: "Official" screenshot

Visor is written in Ruby, and is easy to install (though the installation process is a little more, ahem, manual than your typical Mac OS application.

Tip: By default, Visor slides away when the window loses focus. Sometimes, though, it is desirable to keep the visor down for short (or perhaps long) periods while working in another window. To do this, expand visor and then click on the visor terminal icon on the right side of your menu bar. Select "pin" and the visor will stay open. To set it back to its regular behavior, select "unpin".

Thanks to sdboyer for turning me on to Visor.