Developer Tools

Stow Your Dotfiles – GNU Stow for Managing Symlinks

If you’ve done much work with command line tools, you’ve undoubtedly wrestled with dotfiles, those pesky configuration files in your home directory that are hidden from view by having a dot at the beginning of their name. Bash uses a .bashrc configuration file. Vim uses a .vimrc file and a .vim directory for additional scripts. Tmux uses a .tmux.conf file. Git uses a global .gitconfig. Untold other tools follow the pattern.

Read more on Stow Your Dotfiles – GNU Stow for Managing Symlinks…

Interacting with Git: Cryptic RPC Errors, HTTPS, and SSH

In my experience, working with a Git repository hosted by Gitlab, Github, or Gitorious has generally been issue free and enjoyable. Recently, however, three members of my team ran across the same cryptic RPC error when trying to push changes to a remote repository on Gitlab:

1

error: RPC failed; result=22, HTTP code = 411

In two cases, developers were trying to push new framework libraries (they were moderately sized, 2-9 MB). In the third case, a designer was trying to push a large batch of image assets. In all cases, the problem was caused by using the HTTPS protocol with a server configuration that disallowed individual files larger than 1 MB.

After some basic investigation (thanks Stack Overflow!), we found that using the SSH protocol with Git solved the problem. This type of issue could trip up a new user of Git, so I am going to use this post to briefly describe the problem and summarize the pros/cons of using HTTPS vs. SSH protocols to talk to remote repositories.

Read more on Interacting with Git: Cryptic RPC Errors, HTTPS, and SSH…

Sharpen Your Git Saw – Aliases, Selective Staging, & Interactive Rebasing

Git is a powerful tool that we love as developers. It’s also complicated. I consider the bare essentials of Git, the minimum set of features to be familiar with before we can be productive, to be all of this:

  • local interaction: status, add, remove, commit, reset, checkout
  • branch management: checkout, merge
  • remote interaction: clone, fetch, push, pull

Once we’ve learned these basics well, we move onto advanced features and tricks. Read more on Sharpen Your Git Saw – Aliases, Selective Staging, & Interactive Rebasing…

Git-SVN Gotcha with Empty Directories

This short post is intended to serve as a warning about a potential gotcha with git-svn, and how to prevent it.

An Anecdote

First, a sort of “postmortem” of my run-in with this issue:

I was working to migrate an old SVN repository full of documents to Git. We had decided that we didn’t need to maintain a complete history going forward, that we would just take what was currently there and put it in a new Git repository. We would keep the old SVN repository around for reference in case we ever did need to go back through that older history. We wanted to preserve the old history in SVN, but make a clean break from it for a fresh start with a new Git repo.

I used SVN to check out a fresh copy of the repo, removed .svn, turned the directory into a Git repo, and pushed it out to the new remote. All good there. Read more on Git-SVN Gotcha with Empty Directories…

Customizing IntelliJ for Emacs Compatibility

Atomic Object has a great tradition of making and customizing tools. It’s a habit I’ve gained and lost several times over my career — keeping tools sharp requires time and effort. Fortunately, one of the best things about becoming an Atom is that all of my colleagues care deeply about software, so it’s easy to find inspiration to start making tools again.

Recently, I’ve been working on a modern Java web app, and I ended up going all-in on IntelliJ 13. It’s a great development environment for mixed language web development (and Android!). The biggest down-side for me is its poor Emacs compatibility out of the box. The pain of hitting keys that don’t work or do something unexpected sent me looking for a cure. As a life-long Emacs user, I just wasn’t willing to down-grade to the Vim plugin, so what started out as key binding tweaks became full-blown plugin development to customize IntelliJ.

My fingers are happy with what IntelliJ can do now, and there’s a clear elisp-style path to add features that I miss. Read more on Customizing IntelliJ for Emacs Compatibility…

Taking a Screenshot on Mac OS X

There are many ways you can take a screenshot on your Mac.  The best method often depends on the portion of the screen you need to capture and how you intend to use the captured image.

The tools and tricks themselves are not complicated, but pausing to look something up while in the middle of a work session with a client can be distracting. This blog post, therefore, is a little self serving; I simply collected my favorite options in one place as a quick reference. Hopefully it will be useful to others as well. Read more on Taking a Screenshot on Mac OS X…