Mavericks brings yet another version of Apple’s OS X and the continued existence of Dashboard confuses everyone. Here’s how to completely turn it off:

$ defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

Also for the hardcore — Completely turn off Desktop:

$ defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool true

The folder will still exist it just wont be your desktop. You might have to re-log in for it to take effect. With these two power-settings you’re ready to concentrate and do your best procrastination on something better than files or widgets – fx Twitter.

Editorial is my favourite iPad editor. Here’s a workflow that I made. It extends the current selection one word backwards.


Because of how Editorial workflows work I had to do a bit of hackery to make it work. The idea is to find the starting position of the word just before the current selection. My first version looped through every single word up till the selection but that was unusably slow on large documents. So this version only loops through every word in the 50 letters leading up to the selection. A hack, but it works really well.

I use vim split windows all the time. Instead of tabbing between files I just open another split. Especially if the change is small.

Here’s to of my favourties from my vimrc: <c-w>S to open a full-width, horizontal split topmost and <c-w>V to open a full-height, vertical split rightmost.

" Open splits at top level
map <c-w>V :botright :vertical :split<cr>
map <c-w>S :topleft :split<cr>

This is what it could look like:


Pretty simple. Pretty neat.

nb (new branch) is my very simplified method of creating new feature og fix branches in git.

When I’m working on fixes or features in an existing project, I check out a new branch. This also makes it way easier to create easily understood pull-requests when you need to get it reviewed.

# nb.zsh
nb () {
  if [[ $# > 0 ]]
  then
    if [[ $(git branch | tr -d '* ' | grep "$1") != "" ]]
    then
      git checkout $1
    else
      git checkout master && git checkout -b $1
    fi
  else
    git branch | tr -d '* '
  fi
}
# completion
_nb() { reply=($(git branch | tr -d '* ' | xargs echo)) }
compctl -K _nb nb

Without any arguments it just lists the current, existing, local branches. These are the ones it will tab-complete. If the argument is an existing branch then check it out, if it’s not then create it based on master.

I’m using zsh and I’m not sure what it would take to make it work in bash. Probably not too much.

At Firmafon we almost always concentrate updates into Github’s pull reqeusts. This provides a nice overview of the changes and an obvious place to discuss them. Here’s two scripts that I use to make this process even easier.

The first one’s called last_commit_message:

#!/bin/sh
git --no-pager log -1 --pretty=%B | sed -e "s/^ *//g" -e "s/ *$//g" | tr -d "\n"

This outputs the last commit’s message, inline without anything else but the message.

The other is called prl:

#!/bin/sh -x
set -e

last_msg="`last_commit_message`"
git push -u
url=`hub pull-request "$last_msg"`
open "$url"

This get’s the last commit’s message for use as the pull request’s title. Then it pushes to a remote branch.

Then using Github’s hub command (brew install hub) it creates a pull request from the current HEAD, catches the returned url and open’s it.

When I’ve read something and want to link to it or send it to a friend I need to grab the URL from Safari. This consists of tapping the minimized address bar, then tap the address bar, then tap a million times to make the Copy/Paste popup show, then copy. This is not easy.

With this bookmarklet in your Favorites folder, it’s as easy as tap, tap, tap and you’re done.

var a=encodeURI(window.location.href);window.location='drafts://x-callback-url/create?text='+a+'&action=Copy%20to%20Clipboard&x-success='+a;

Drafts opens up, copies the url and sends you back to Safari.

I’ve become very fond of attaching animated GIF’s of new UI elements when I create pull requests at Firmafon. Recording a part of the screen is very easy using Quicksilver’s built-in screen recording and trimming features. Then when done, open the file in GIF Brewery and make it a gif. I usually lock the FPS to 15 and use the Simple Palette.

So far so good, we have a gif. Let’s put it somewhere we can reference. Imgur is great and keeps the images around for a long enough time for our colleagues to see it on Github. Luckily a command-line client for imgur already exists so grab imguru from Github and put it in ~/bin (or anywhere you’d like).

Quicksilver knows Applescript and supports custom actions in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions, so open up AppleScript Editor.app and make a script with the following:

using terms from application "Quicksilver"
  on open theFile
    try
      set filePath to POSIX path of theFile
      set theCommand to "~/bin/imguru '" & filePath & "'"
      return do shell script theCommand
    on error e number n
      return e
    end try
  end open

  -- Tell Quicksilver we only work with files
  on get direct types
    return {"NSFilenamesPboardType"}
  end get direct types
end using terms from

Save it as Upload to imgur.scpt or something like it and you might have to restart Quicksilver and you’re there.

A place for releasing stuff and explaining Gists.