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Vim Tip: Handling Long Lines of Text
When you’re using Vim to read log files or write blog posts, one problem that you may come up against is wrapping long lines of text. Vim, being the powerful editor that it is, can handle this in...
read articleHow to Create Terminal Progress Indicators in Ruby
When you’re developing a terminal application, it’s usually helpful to indicate the progress of a long running task. Over the years, I’ve done this in a number of ways. Most of them involve printing...
read articleVim Tip: Temporary Key Mappings
One trick that I often use with Vim is temporarily mapping keys for tasks I need to perform in my current context. For example, when working on a small Ruby script, I may want to run it a few times to...
read articleA Brief Introduction to Ruby's Kernel.fork
Recently, a coworker asked if I could help with manipulating some large CSV files. Each file contained approximately 1.2 million records and was over 200 megabytes in size. I’ve never worked with such...
read articleVim Tip: How to Use Vertical Guides
Vertical guides are a feature of most modern text editors that are useful when aligning text. Programmers typically use these to ensure that their code is indented properly or doesn’t exceed a certain...
read articleParsing Bookmarks With Nokogiri
I’ve been working on a feature for one of my side projects that requires parsing bookmarks files that have been exported from a web browser. Most browsers export bookmarks in the Netscape Bookmark...
read articleVim Tip: How to Display Whitespace Characters
One of the things that took me awhile to figure out when I started using Vim was how to display whitespace characters. Whitespace characters are characters that take up space in a document but are not...
read articleGetting Started With Authlogic on Rails 3
Authlogic is “a clean, simple, and unobtrusive ruby authentication solution”. I’ve used it successfully in several Rails projects. It’s easy to setup, it’s easy to test, it’s flexible, and it has...
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