My idea is that I want to jot down a quick blog post each time I find myself using a trick or technique that might be useful to others, and that can be explained in a relatively short blog post.
(The qualifier 'relatively' in the previous sentence is necessary - I tend to have trouble keeping the number of words in a post down to a reasonable number. I'll try to keep it short and to the point!)
It dawned on me that a lot of tricks I have personally come to find mundane and obvious can be life-changing news to some people. I had forgotten how it was for me, how nothing was obvious, when I started out doing this job long, long time ago.
If you're a hardened, experienced software developer or computer tinkerer - my blog posts are not really for you. You might find the odd gem, but most of the stuff you'll go 'duh - knew that'. But if you're starting out on a new challenge, the wee tricks I'll be describing are things that made my life easier - and I hope they'll make yours easier too.
Ok, to make a living, I am writing software, in various environments, using C++, JavaScript, ExtendScript, REALbasic, PHP, you name it... on Mac, Windows and Linux. As a project grows, invariably I 'll need a spot to put down some 'rubbish' files - temporary files created by my program that are only needed for a little while, and then can get trashed.
Sometimes, while debugging, I want to access those rubbish files with my text editor to inspect their contents - for example, to verify all is well at a certain stage of the program execution.
Mac OS X and Linux (both close relatives of Unix) have a number of spots for storing temporary files - but as on most forms of Unix, you can access that location using the /tmp path. Sometimes /tmp is not a real directory but rather an alias or link to some other place - but that does not matter too much.
If you start a command line session (go to /Applications/Utilities, and start Terminal), you can type
cd /tmp
ls
to see what's in it.
On Windows, you go to the Start button, select the Run... option, and type cmd into the Open field.
Click Ok. That brings up a command line window.
In the command line window, type
cd %TEMP%
dir
to see what's in it.
As it goes, I tend to hop all over the place in my command line sessions - using the cd command to hop from directory to directory.
Occasionally, I find myself in a command line session in a deeply nested directory, and I wish I had a Finder or Explorer window to get a better overview of the directory (aka folder) contents.
That's easy: on Mac, you simply type
open .
And on Windows, you type
explorer .
in the command line (i.e. open<Space><Period><Enter>, or explorer<Space><Period><Enter>), and a Finder or Explorer window will pop up showing the contents of the directory you're in. Then you can start dragging icons of the files you see onto various apps to inspect them. For example, I often use BBEdit, TextWrangler, 0xED on Mac, and UltraEdit or UEStudio on Windows.
If you're on the command line, and you want to inspect a text file in the current directory, that's easy enough too. I am personally well-aquainted with vi, a crusty old Unix text editor, and I use it a lot, but vi is not exactly user-friendly.
No worries - on Mac, if you have TextWrangler installed (which is a free download from BareBones), it should have asked you whether you wanted to install the command line tools. If you're not sure whether you allowed it or not - go to the TextWrangler menu, and select Install Command Line Tools...
From now on, when you're in a command line session in Terminal, you can simply type something like:
edit whateverfilename.log
to inspect the contents of the file whateverfilename.log in TextWrangler, assuming you'd have a file called whateverfilename.log in your current directory.
If you have BBEdit (TextWrangler's big brother) installed, simply substitute bbedit for edit on the command line.
On Windows, it depends on the text editor you have - everyone has Notepad or Wordpad (called write on the command line). If you have UEStudio installed, you can use that too - you could type a command similar to any of the following:
notepad whateverfilename.txt
write anotherfilename.log
uestudio yetanother.out
Now, suppose I wanted to quickly open a Finder window on the /tmp directory without needing to start up the Terminal program. If you go and look on your startup drive, you won't see it - it's there, but the Finder hides system folders like /tmp.
To get there using the Finder, select the Go - Go To Folder... menu item, and type /tmp in the dialog. Click the Go button - and you should get a Finder window on the /tmp folder.
On Windows, to quickly access a hidden folder, you go to the Run... function in the Start menu, and type in the path name. Type %TEMP% to open a window onto the temporary folder. Or type %APPDATA% to get an Explorer window straight onto the current user's hidden application data folder.
On Mac, if you need to be in the /tmp folder a lot (or any other system folder like that - /var/log for example), simply drag the little folder icon of the window for /tmp to the side bar of the Finder window - from now on you can click an icon to have instant Finder access to /tmp
Another cool one to have in the sidebar is the Originals or Masters folder inside your Pictures/iPhoto Library folder - you can get at the original files without having to go through the whole right-click, Show Package Contents routine on the iPhoto Library every time. Be careful though: you should only look at, and not touch the contents of those folders.
Windows 7 has a very similar functionality - you can drag folder icons into the Favorites on the sidebar.
Going from Finder or Explorer to Terminal or the Windows command line is also easy. Suppose you have a Finder window open, and you want to get a Terminal window positioned in the same folder.
Go to the Terminal, and type cd<Space>
I hope that was useful! There's more stuff like this I could blog about - let me know whether anyone is interested!
Cheers,
Kris
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