Tag Archives: terminal

Going a little command line crazy

February 1st, 2011

I’m not sure why but I’m on a command line kick lately. Not just the Tron Legacy style for Terminal but I’ve now begun using iTerm2 as my Terminal application of choice. I have it in a second Space on Mac OS X fullscreen with 3 shells running.

The first shell is 50% of the screen split vertically. The other two are each 25% of the right-side of the screen split horizontally. This way I can edit files in the left hand pane via Pico or Vim, use Git in the lower right-hand corner and be SSHed into my server in the top right. Here is a screenshot.

The inspiration for this came from constantly seeing my fellow Viddler team member Todd Troxell rock the command line exclusively. Dude is hardcore and seldom uses any UI save for the Web itself.

Today I’ve used Lifehacker’s guide to using Notational Velocity via the command line since I was already using Notational Velocity app on my Mac, Simplenote on my iPhone and iPad I figured I might as well add the ability to edit these same files via the command line. Thanks to Dropbox all of these files are kept nicely in sync between all of my devices. It is sort of like living in the past and the future at the exact same time.

Now I just need to update my Tron Legacy style for Terminal to work with iTerm2 and I should be pretty well set to be about as geeky as I’ve ever been.

Tron Legacy Terminal style for Mac OS X

January 10th, 2011

Every since seeing Tron Legacy I’ve wanted Flynn’s computer. From what I’ve heard on the Interwebs it runs Sun Solaris. Since I’m a Mac guy maybe I can have my Terminal look like The Grid’s UI without needing to run an entirely different OS.

I’m basing this style solely off of this screenshot from the Tron Legacy movie trailer. Here is what my Terminal looks like now.

There is still more to do. First, I have to find the font that they are using (font experts, help?). If you want to contribute to this I’ve put the style up on GitHub.

Export your Delicious bookmarks using Terminal on Mac OS X

December 21st, 2010

Reading Jeremy Keith’s recap of the fact that Delicious is shutting down being sold off and that he wanted to pull all of his bookmarks off of the service and onto his site reminded me that I wanted to do the same thing.

His example shows an easy way to grab all of your Delicious bookmarks off of the service. Only, if you are a Terminal newb you may not have any idea what just happened after you run his suggested command.

So, my suggestion is to run the following command. First, open Terminal by opening the ~/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app or simply type Terminal into Spotlight and hit Enter. Then, run this command.

curl https://username:password@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all -o "delicious.xml"

That -o flag, or option, tells curl that you’d like to save the file. The filename that you’d like to use is in the quotes. Now, you’ll have a single XML file saved in your Home directory called delicious.xml with all of your Delicious Bookmarks.

What you do with that is up to you. Just about any text editor will allow you to read the .xml file.

Oh, and like Mr. Keith I’ll be posting all of my links back onto Delicious as well. I just have to write a quick plugin for WordPress. I’m sure I’ll find time for that sometime in 2011. I’ve never thought of doing that (no idea why) but I am going to start. I don’t know what the future holds for Delicious but either way it is fun and easy to “dual post” the links.

Installing Ruby and RubyGems (including Rails and mySQL) on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

December 7th, 2009

In case you’ve been living under a rock (where in the world did that phrase originate?) you probably know about Dan Benjamin‘s extremely simple, yet incredibly useful and valuable, step-by-step tutorial for installing Ruby, RubyGems (including Rails and mySQL) on Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

I recently had the need to upgrade each of these on my Snow Leopard install and it worked perfectly.

Open a file from Terminal with Coda

December 6th, 2009

If you’re like me, you love Coda. Well, you may find the need to open a file, or set of files, from Terminal in Coda. Gregory Tomlinson has created a bash script to let you do just that.

Update May 20, 2011: It turns out that Tomlinson’s website is down. So, here is a brief synopsis of what you can do to add this functionality to your Mac.

  • Open Terminal
  • In terminal, enter: open .profile
  • Add the following lines of code
    # TextMate
    # set path and simple shell function
    export TEXTMATE_PATH=/Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/Resources/mate
    mate () {
    $TEXTMATE_PATH $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6
    }
    # svn for TextMate (default editor, end-of-line types)
    export EDITOR="$TEXTMATE_PATH -w"
    export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

    # Coda
    # set path
    export CODA_PATH=/Applications/Coda.app
    # function roughly like 'mate .' by expanding '.' to '*.htm*'
    coda () {
    if [[ "." == $1 ]]
    then
    open -a $CODA_PATH *.htm*
    else
    open -a $CODA_PATH $1 $2 $3
    fi
    }

  • Save .profile
  • Quit Terminal
  • Restart Terminal

There is also a slightly more robust script written for Coda by Aditya Bhargava that handles a few more tidbits and it is available on GitHub.