botwerks

lately, i’ve been doing a lot of writing for work.  test plans, paper outlines, summaries, etc.  i don’t know what the deal has been but it’s been a notable shift in prose generation.  despite the fact that my co-workers seem to do everything in MSFT word, i have a strong need to do at least the first cut in emacs.  here are a few things that have made me most productive on the prose generation front.

• org-mode – if you haven’t heard about this, well, get out from underneath your rock.  this is where i do 90+% of my outlining and meeting note capture.  C-c c is the catchall for things which require more verbiage than one can capture with the omnifocus pop-up.  if i need to start grabbing shit freestyle, this is where i go.  it’s a dessert topping, floor wax and an organizer all wrapped up in one.  did i mention that there’s a handy twiki export mode as well?  oh, and the latest version includes support for opendocument text format export.
• ns-toggle-fullscreen – this is a patch to emacs for OS X.  if you build emacs.app from the ports collection you simply need to include the +fullscreen variant and you’re golden.  this removes all the chrome from emacs (which should be turned off for the most part anyway) and forces emacs to take up the entire screen.  it’s incredibly useful.  you have the ability to split the display, etc. but you’re doing it over all of you display.  bigass router configs and code can line up side by side and you’re not going to have email, etc. getting in the way.
• darkroom-mode – while ns-toggle-fullscreen gets you about 90% there for a distraction free environment, it’s nice to have large margins on the side of the screen to focus the display right in the middle.  darkroom-mode emulates the popular writeroom, scrivener and other applications focused on minimizing distraction. but it gives you all of the power of emacs. very nice. you don’t have to retrain your fingers only to pull it back into emacs to do the cleanup and organization anyways.
• solarized theme – when i’m not in full screen writing mode, this theme is incredibly easy on the eyes.  i’ve basically embraced this across the board for X11, term, iterm, vim, emacs, etc.  the dude who assembled this, did his homework.  folks have ported this theme to pretty much everything, it’s worth adding the git repo to your collection of stuff to keep track of.

on the main server create the directory and initialize a bare repo on the server.

% mkdir path_to_repo
% cd path_to_repo
% git --bare init

from the local machine with your content/code, add the remote origin and push your code to the repo.

% cd path_to_local_source
% git remote add origin ssh://hostname/path_to_repo
% git push origin master

share it or get it from another location …

% git clone ssh://hostname/path_to_repo

assumes that the person has an account on the host with the appropriate permissions to modify or read the repo contents.

pull changes from the server to pick up the latest …

% git pull origin master

follow the advice here: http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html

seriously. just do it.

if you need a GUI, SuperDuper, works wonderfully.  this will save your ass. no joke.

productivity

omnifocus – the most powerful productivity tool on my mac.  i used to use a collection of text files, scripts, etc.  this just slurps it all up and syncs to my phone.  i use a hacked version of GTD for my workflow, which omnifocus is oriented to. however, as a catchall for things that need to get done, this can’t be beat.  infinitely customizable and tweakable.  i haven’t found too many things that it doesn’t just do.

adium – the last word in instant messengers for the mac.  covers pretty much every protocol out there and a few that you really wish would just die already.  the latest beta builds include support for twitter.  i have to confess that integrated twitter support is a lot handier than i expected.

gitx – gui git client for the mac.  this actually rocks pretty hard.  graphical display of what you have going with your local git repo and useful for dorks like me who do everything in emacs before they shove it into word to share with coworkers.

vmware –  i used to be a parallels fan.  then vmware fusion came out and the performance was awesome, i could use other folks VMs and it didn’t sporadically suck up all available CPU.  joy ensued.

cord – the best remote desktop client i’ve seen to date.  full screen mode rocks, there’s support for font smoothing and unlike the microsoft remote desktop client, it just works.  neat features like connect in full-screen mode and drawer storage of configs, etc are quite handy.

the usual apps

keynote – this is part of the iWork suite and i’ve personally found it to be a better presentation package than pretty much anything else i’ve seen.  which isn’t a particularly high standard to beat, given that pretty much all presentation software sucks rocks.  this is a notable exception it’s an excellent package.

microsoft word – over the years i’ve made my peace with MS word.  under the mac it’s proven to be a more than capable platform for crafting those internal missives.

entourage – quite frankly i regard this as a flaming hunk of shit.  i’ve made my peace with it and perturb it as little as possible with the fear that it will flame out and crash horribly.  the sync function is barely passable.  that it talks to exchange servers is nothing short of a miracle.  it’s consistently had issues with parsing timezone information and the management of meeting invites and lack of a plug-in architecture has me consistently wondering if they’ve taken explicit pains to make this a royal pain in the ass to use.  treat with care it will likely fsck you over.  i refuse to put real email into this given the proprietary database backend and repeated exposure to horror stories involving corrupted databases.  if i can’t edit my email with a text editor something’s gone horribly wrong.