Yesterday we had the honour of welcoming the company’s fifth employee to the team, Tony Issakov.
Tony’s worked on some projects with us in the past (so you might have already seen his handywork) and has been a good friend to each of us for some time now.
He shares our enthusiasm for web development and all things geeky. He’s best known for his amazing digital photography and mad JavaScript skills, and comes to us having spent many years developing Java applications as en employee of the state government. The move from Java to Ruby and PHP, as well as his shiny new MacBook Pro and having Epic Espresso just up the street are all things that he’s excited about, but I’ll let him elaborate on that. As they say, “watch this space.”
We’re looking forward to the new opportunities we’ll be able to undertake with the inclusion of Tony to our team.
For as long as I can remember I’ve used vim (or vi) as my editor of choice when on Linux or UNIX systems. I’ve also used bash as my shell, except in circumstances where it wasn’t available. We’ve been using Macs for a long time now, and one of the things that I only recently learnt was that you can use CTRL-a to take you to the beginning of a line in a terminal. This meant I no longer leant on the left arrow key to get me back to the beginning of a long command.
I use screen to maintain remote, active connections to our various servers, and with my setup the CTRL-a trick didn’t work. I’ve just found that setting vi mode in bash will allow me to hit ESC then shift-I and take me to the beginning of a line. ESC engages vi mode, and you can navigate around the command as you would inside vi. For example, shift-I or 0 takes you to the start of the line, shift-a or $ to the end and h, l, k and j act as cursor keys.
You can engage vi mode by executing the following code, or adding it to your ~/.profile (or any other dot file that is executed upon login).
set -o vi
I always like finding new shortcuts, even if there’s some minor annoyance at my former lack of awareness. It’s like how we discovered syntax highlighting in vim after completing our uni degrees… very bittersweet.