A few years ago, I wrote Makefiles are Software Too, which laid out some "generic requirements" for any build scripts (Make, Ant, Scons, Fabric, etc) that you're writing. I still think those are important, but over the past (nearly) four years I've worked with more systems, and I ...

It's a hassle to have to switch from emacs to the shell, run unit tests, pick out the failure, switch back to emacs, navigate to the line, forget where you were supposed to go, switch back, etc etc.

The whole process is much easier with compilation-perl.el. This handy ...

Exploring zsh features made me want to figure out some of the history-editing wizardry. (Bash has similar history tricks, I just never bothered to dive too deeply into them.)

If you want to experiment with history expansion a bit, you can echo the result instead of executing it:

hostname:~/dir ...

The items below are useful systems based on my experience working with a bunch of different software teams at a handful of companies over the past decade-plus. I haven't bothered to list things like compilers, interpreters, libraries, etc. If you don't have those, you aren't making software ...

(This is part five in a series of posts on ssh.)

Let's say you have a half-dozen machines at work you want to log into. Instead of setting up a remote forwarding connection from each of those machines, you can have the connection from your main machine perform multiple ...