Development tools

Setting up (yet another) MacBook before trip to client I got to re-visit all of my tools I use to work on Magento (and almost all other programing stuff I'm working on) so I decided to (finally) make I list of stuff I always install/use.

OS: OS X

It Just Works.

After years of maintaing all of the popular OSes one learns to appreciate that simple and yet powerful quote.

I do use Linux on my PC but I still can't find good replacements for tools I'm using on OS X. I even have Windows lying around, but only for gaming, development on Windows is ... (let's not go here ;))

Editor: TextMate

After a years of searching I still can't find anything better -- simple, extendable, fast ... (i do use Geany on Linux too). With the right collection of bundles it's simply unbeatable (I did use vim, emacsen, ... but let's not start editor wars all over again :))

And as icing on the cake 2.0 is just around the corner!

Story about using TextMate would not be complete without some of the great bundles I'm using with it

GetBundle

(some links are dead so I'm linking on TextMate blog entry instead)

Easiest way to get one of the zillion bundles for the TextMate

Using it it is easy to get Python, PHP, Validate On Save, Git related and all other bundles which make development much more easier.

Full screen on Lion

I'm the first one when complaining about people using full screen windows on modern monitors, but ... on 13" MacBook new Lion's fullscreen mode begins to shine, especially coupled with multitouch gestures.

Missing Drawer

This is a great companion for the full screen bundle as TextMate's full screen mode is missing project driver without it. Also adds neat little button for opening terminal window directly from within project drawer.

VCS: GIT

Enough said. No developer should work without some VCS in place ... never. GIT is my favorite almost from the moment I first saw it. Distributed VCS FTW!

Source Tree

Source Tree is nice GIT/HG GUI wrapper, and it's free :)

Terminal.app

I do spend rest of my development time in it (when I do not write code in editor) and anyone trying to develop on Win knows why it's on the list.

FTP/SFTP/... client: Cyberduck

Simply the best client on OSX and Win.

Browsers: All of them

Enough said ... someone please, please, please ... kill (or if that's possible fix) that IE ... please!!!!! And while at it ... hit Flash for me ... hard!

Magento

Pffff ... well ... ummm ...

I don't want to fill this entry with lot of the nasty words ... It's a shame that their software designs skills are not good as their marketing skills.

Hopefully 2.0 team will learn how to design something which is not ...

PHP

PHP language design is ... lacking to say it mildly ...

Python

OS X of the programing languages -- It Just Works!

---

Ouch, this is turning in real big wall of text ... better to wrap it up

to be continued...

WinMerge

Another nice one in toolkit great diff tool nicely integrated in rclick menu.

WinSCP

Main thing which I was missing on filezilla was need to confirm upload when editing remote files (damn I miss Cyberduck)

WinSCP has it and on plus side it can be made to look just like TotalCommander :D

KeePass Password Safe

One of small tool jewels for anyone who needs to keep tracks of lot's of account/passwords. It keeps them in AES/Twofish encrypted file, can auto-type username/password in most of dialogs/shells and also can "drag" that trough clipboard to add even more protection from keyloggers. Did I mention that it can organize all needed passwords very nicely :)

As password file is encrypted is fairly safe to keep backup of it on dropbox for example - no more hunting for lost passwords :)

And it's Open Source :)

My magento .gitignore

Based on Git ignore (.gitignore) file for Magento project I started working on my version of it. I published it as gist on GitHub so it will be easier to maintain. Here it is:

SubSwitch

SubSwitch is a great Thunderbird addon if you have need to organize your email, it help adding meaningful subject lines to outgoing mails just like I used with various mailing lists (like [Foo]) so latter filtering will be very easy.

Only problem I did found is that saving preferences do not work on *NIX version of Thunderbird 3, probably some permission problems.

Ditz - issue tracker for me

Last few days I was (also) hunting for useful, small, unobtrusive and preferably distributed or at least hosted multi component - multi project issue tracker. And sure there are a ton's of them but ... I don't need all that complexity (yet) that first-class trackers like Trac, Mantis and other's offer ... I just need to track my issues/tasks locally and maybe share them with a few others ...

An there Ditz shines! in the true UNIX philosophy -- do just one thing, but do it right -- he uses plain text files in directory to store task, simple shell commands to manipulate with them and on top of that it can generate very nice HTML issue page(s) so you can use (and send) just like some type of progress report. I really can't find any faster and simpler solution for task management than:

$ ditz add
Title: find fooo
[snip help mesage]
Find baz's partner
.

For the rest of command syntax see Ditz site

Hehe mail foo@bar.baz flashback :)

And, that's it task is in bugs directory (can be configured) as just plain YAML file. One can put that dir with sorce and under some DVCS and ... instant distributed issue tracking :D

And there is more .... all that functionality is just a few K of ruby scripts which will run on anything you can get ruby to work :) -- even on Windows ;)

Now, if I can manage to find me a good shell which works on Windows - I tried cygwin and lot of others, but I don't want UNIX emulation (and their path emulations, gimme C:\_ dammit ;)) -- I just want workable bash-like shell, rest of toolkit is already provided with GNUWin32...

PSPad

In my never ending hunt for good windows programmer's editor I stumbled on this nice one.

PSPad for now (finally) looks as something that I can use for may day-to-day programing.

I specially like concept of virtual folders so I can pull out and organize files independent of real location on file system (really useful when working on magento theming as needed files are all over the place).

VirtualBox

Put sticker *bang head here* ... use it ... rinse and repeat ....

After managing to install 3 OSes on same machine (should I count macbook's OSX as 4th, hmmm) and juggling some time between them I (finally) remembered that I can simply virtualize ... *more banging*

Now, while my Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server happily ticking in a background VirtualBox (yes, old one but it's (more or less) exact clone of my deployment VPS server) - I got perfect testing grounds for sites before making changes on live server (as soon I finish next, I'll post my adventures with git/virtualenv/fabric/django deployment cycle).

Not to mention that snapshots are great tool to try things and recover after hosing box with some ludicrous setting (etckeeper can save you sometimes but not always).

And finally got a chance to test OpenSolaris without need to add (yet another) HDD in my poor PC :)

DISQUS

Just to mention this great tool for adding comments on sites ... totally external and working great

Embeddable pastebin

While reading this post in comments I stumbled to great embeddable pastebin resource.

I'm using the GitHub for a while now but I newer noticed that I can use as a pastebin and even better as a embeddable code highlighter.