Matthew Lang

The text editor. The programmer's most important tool and the center of an ongoing debate that will occupy programmers for years.

I'm not going to debate on the best editor as that would be stupid. Everyone has their own preferences and needs. Vim does offer some nice advantages for those familiar with all the necessary keystrokes, but for my needs I just want a nice, extensible text editor that I am comfortable with. I chose Sublime Text 2 a couple of years ago and more recently I have started using Sublime Text 3 for my day to day coding needs.

The Essentials

Okay they're not really essentials, but if you can't even look at your text editor then you're already hitting your first hurdle. Not only does Sublime Text allow you to change the colour scheme and fonts for the different languages you code in, but it also allows you to change the theme of the editor. A nice touch I think you'll agree.

Theme

I settled on the Flatland theme a few months ago. Its non-gradient look might be a bit bare for some, but I do like this theme. It's very dark and I prefer the dark background in my sidebar and tabs.

It also allows you to customise the height of the folders and files in your sidebar. By default Sublime does have a fair margin around these, but Flatland allows you to specify a smaller size, so that you can fit more into your sidebar.

Colour Scheme

Long before I started using Sublime Text 2, I was already using the Solarized colour scheme. I've stuck with it ever since and even use it as the colour scheme for my terminal. I prefer the dark version as the light version does have too much of a stark contrast with the Flatland theme.

Font

I've tried lots of fonts for programming with, but I find that Monaco, a font shipped with OS X, is best suited to my needs. It looks nice on my MacBook Pro and on my external monitor with just a small difference between the two screens.

Installed Packages

I do have a fair number of packages installed for specific things like Cucumber, RSpec, Rails and other language and framework specific needs so I'm going to list those packages that are independent of language and therefore get used on a frequent basis.

AllAutoComplete

Sublime Text 2 just came with autocomplete listings for the file you had currently open, so this plugin is a welcome addition as it includes all currently open files for your autocomplete listing.

SublimeGit

This package is a great package with plenty of integration with Git. It's also the first paid package that I have used with Sublime Text 3. As I use Git all the time, this plugin been worth every penny.

GitGutter

GitGutter allows you to see which lines have been inserted, deleted and modified. It's basically a diff for your editor. Little symbols appear in your editors margin to signify where code has been changed. At a glance it's nice to see where I have modified a single file.

Origami

You can't use Vim and not be impressed with being able to split panes with just a few keystrokes. It was one of the few things I have managed to remember from my many sojourns to the land of Vim. Sublime Text does have the same ability to split panes, but the keystrokes for this are difficult to remember.

Origami makes splitting panes much easier by providing easier to remember keystrokes for manipulating and navigating through panes as well as having the same commands available in the command palette.

MarkdownEditing

I handle a lot of files in Markdown. It's the default markup for the majority of files that I create and use. Brett Terpstra's MarkdownEditing package provides some sensible defaults for editing Markdown files. It also provides some handy keyboard shortcuts for manipulating Markdown files such as inserting headings, pasting links and adding footnotes.

CTags

Although Sublime Text has built in support for finding symbols in the current file, having ctags support just makes navigating between methods a lot easier. Rather than switching to a file and searching for the symbol, I can simply use ctags to pull up all symbols for the project navigate straight to the method I need.

So there we go, a quick run down of my Sublime Text 3 setup. If you're looking for preferences files then I must do an update of these on Github, but I'll provide a link here when that's done in the next couple of days, so be sure to check back.

Yet another big Apple announcement goes by and yet again we see just marginal improvements on the products that Apple have become famous for. Not that I was expecting anything grand or game changing, it's just that the hype around these things by tech sites and magazines is reaching the scales of ridiculous.

It seems common place now for magazine sites like The Verge to live blog these events even though we know 90% of what's coming. I wasn't surprised by anything that was announced at the event. 64-bit processors in the new iPhone 5S ... not surprised. Fingerprint security ... thought it was coming. It comes in gold! We already knew that.

Then there's the analysis and opinions of millions of people on whether this is Apple at their best or not. A million pointless questions being asked and everyone has their own answer. Not that it matters of course, because Apple will do what Apple want to do regardless of the views and opinions of others.

Debating on topics is fun, but I'm bored with the Apple debate now. Let them do what they do best, it's clearly working for them. If you like their products then fine, buy them. If not, go find an alternative. The world doesn't need a million different view points on a phone or a computer or anything materialistic like that.

There are more important things happening right now like state surveillance, war, chemical weapons and conflict. Maybe if these were debated with the same energy as the latest iPhone, we might actually make enough noise for those who should be listening to invoke change. It's a long shot, but it's worth a try.

Nothing better than a developer debate over preferred programming fonts. I love the look of this new programming font, Hermit. Looking forward to it becoming available in the next few days.

It's a no brainer really. Books by NB are straight to the point and easy to act upon. I'm looking forward to this one.

Right now all over the world, open source software is being used by millions of people. Most of these people probably don't even know it, but the services they use on a daily basis are more than likely being powered by open source software in some form. Since it's birth in the early eighties, open source software has become more and more prominent and should now be considered a mainstream topic that hopefully even non-programmers know about.

I've used open source software in my most of my career as a programmer, but it hasn't been until the last five years where open source software has comprised of the majority of tools in my tool belt. From software languages and frameworks to the tools and libraries that I used on a daily basis, open source software has given me a career that I feel very positive about and enjoy working in.

So to all the open source developers who give up their precious time to build software for others to use and enjoy, I just want to say thank you.

Your selfless acts of contributing your time and effort to the world of code for free is reflected in all the greatness that open source software has achieved.

Killer bike for the clan.

via FGGT

Patrick Rhone. Writer, curator, Mac fan, thinker, family man and blog hero. Did I miss anything? It's hard to put Patrick into one box when his blog lets you know that he isn't just good at one thing. He's great at many things.

Patrick's blog first came to my attention when I first started using Twitter. I was simply looking for other people to follow who were interesting. His recommendation came up and I have followed his blog ever since.

Patrick's blog has a mixed bag of topics. Personal thoughts, productivity insights, technology usage and of course writing. The thing about Patrick is that despite his love of technology and its advantages, he still writes about tools like pens, notebooks and index cards and how he uses them. I see it as the perfect balance between man and machine. His blog is a reminder that there's more to getting things done than just buying the next killer app.

Patrick's blog has been daily reading for me for over five years and will continue to be so in the future.

Path, the social network that limits you to just 150 people, just pushed a new update to their app that offers a premium model with complete access to their shop. At the moment their shop comprises of only stickers for use in messages with your family and friends and filters for the pictures you send. The option to upgrade to premium gives you access to all these items in the Path shop for an annual cost of $14.99.

While I applaude Path's decision to finally offer a premium model, it's not the premium model that I envisioned. I don't want stickers, filters or anything like that. I'm looking for the ability to share my posts to other networks like App.net and to others by email. I also want to export the data in my Path so that I have complete access to all the moments I have accrued since I started using Path. There's a lot of good memories in there.

These are the features I would pay for, not stickers and filters. I'm all for supporting the products and services I use, but the product must offer something in terms of real value to me besides it's core functionality. Full access to a sticker book and some Instagram-style filters isn't going to make me upgrade to their premium model.

Perhaps those extra features I described will be available in the future but the for the moment, I'll be staying away from the sticker premium model that Path are offering.