Tool Sharpening: May 17, 2014

Saturday, 17 May, 2014 — development improvement

For some background on what’s going on here, see the first tool sharpening post

In the past week, I’ve put a heavy focus on tuning up BBEdit. As part of this, I reread the BBEdit 10.x release documentation to get a better sense of features I was overlooking. I found number things to identify and tweak.

• Installed new-to-me BBEdit language modules
  • Go (wishful)
  • Rust (wishful)
  • Nginx (practical)
  • Docker (practical)
  • awk (wishful)
• Installed two new BBEdit packages
  • Better Tongs for improving text selection and manipulation with some helper scripts
  • Email for working with email composition through BBEdit. This is built for Mutt, but I’m going to see if I can make it useful anyhow
• Created a BBEdit project with /etc/hosts, ~/.ssh/config and ~/.ssh/known_hosts, files I typically need to touch or update frequently as I work with local Vagrant virtual machines
• Created a Text Expander shortcut to set-up Jinja2 if blocks for Ansible templates
• Created a BBEdit project for working with BBEdit packages, scripts and settings
• Updated BBEdit keyboard shortcuts to:
  • Copy the url of a given file. That ends up looking like file://localhost/foo/bar/baz/bippy/2014-05-18-tool-sharpening.html.md
• Set-up a Git commit message template
• Removed some OS X system-level keyboard shortcuts that were interfering with BBEdit-specific shortcuts for manipulating text
  • Unbeknownst to me before reading the 10.x documentation, BBEdit has shortcuts for moving lines up and down and deleting lines without needing to invoke the clipboard or select the whole line. No, this isn’t different than what vi(m) or Emacs provide for, but a particularly good reason for me to review what the capabilities of my editor are.

A larger aim I’ve had with this project is finding somewhat like activities and starting to refactor them so they can be automated. For instance, I want to have a standard way of prefacing new OmniFocus entries I make for ideas. Then, I can trigger that same entry with Text Expander. From there, I expect I could script a pass through OmniFocus and either auto-file things or do some other post-processing with them. The goal I have is to use OmniFocus on my desktop, iPad or iPhone as an entry point, but have a desktop-based script go into my OmniFocus inbox and filter those idea items into text files, like the one I keep as a Markdown list for improving my environment set-up.