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UPDATE 17 March 2013: I am placing this post into the public domain so people are free to incorporate it into their existing files which may be in the public domain already. As I commented in my last post about tmux, tmux mouse mode left some things to be desired. Namely, there are two problems. First, it completely takes over the mouse. Meaning that you can no longer do a simple “mark text and copy” operation on the native OS. There are patches over this problem, like reattach-to-user-namespace, but that is only helpful if you are running tmux on your Mac. I practically never do that, because most of the usefulness of tmux for me is in leaving active sessions to remote servers. I work on remote servers over ssh connections, detach from tmux, and stick my laptop in its bag. I come back to the session later. That would not be possible if tmux were running on my Mac, so I am almost always running it remotely on a Linux server. ...

UPDATE 17 March 2013: I am placing this post into the public domain so people are free to incorporate it into their existing files which may be in the public domain already. UPDATE 16 July 2012: I have updated this post to reflect my current keymaps, which I settled on after writing the original post. As I’ve said before, I’m a huge fan of iTerm2. I am also a huge fan of tmux, the terminal multiplexor. If you’re not familiar with tmux, it’s conceptually the same thing as GNU screen, with some differences, and (in my opinion) some advantages. For example: ...

I wrote a Vim syntax mode for Octopress. https://github.com/tangledhelix/vim-octopress

A bit of history to give some perspective on our modern issue of piracy (music and movies): A few centuries ago, the penalty for unauthorized copying was breaking on the wheel. It is a term we’re not very familiar with these days, but it was a form of prolonged torturous death penalty where the convict first had every bone in his body broken, and then was weaved into the spokes of a wagon wheel and set up on public display. The cause of death was usually thirst, a couple of days later. ...

Ryan Cash complains about online newspaper sites: Another HUGE complaint I’d like to add to Brad’s list is when these websites draw a story out over 10 pages. Welcome to the Internet – a place where physical pages don’t exist, and there’s no such thing as “no space left”. There is absolutely NO REASON for any story to span over more than one single page. I wholeheartedly agree. But the problem here isn’t cluelessness on the part of the editors. The problem is that newspapers aren’t in the business of providing news, and they never have been. They are in the business of gathering page views. They used to call it circulation, and they used to sell half-page ads, classifieds, and coupon inserts, but it’s the same game as it ever was (except less profitable). ...

Now and then you hear an old-timer rant about how we young people never sit down and write a real letter anymore. (Young in this case is probably defined as under 75.) We’re too busy with our email, our Twitter and Facebook, our IMs and texts. Clearly, they are technically correct. Nobody writes letters anymore. It’s archaic, a relic of a bygone era. It’s simple economics. In the old days, a letter was the best option to reach across a great distance and communicate with someone. Technology has changed the equation; many better options now exist. ...

Paul Graham, on our obsession with material possessions: Companies that sell stuff have spent huge sums training us to think stuff is still valuable. But it would be closer to the truth to treat stuff as worthless.In fact, worse than worthless, because once you’ve accumulated a certain amount of stuff, it starts to own you rather than the other way around. I know of one couple who couldn’t retire to the town they preferred because they couldn’t afford a place there big enough for all their stuff. Their house isn’t theirs; it’s their stuff’s. ...

That’s very true. Unfortunately, Instapaper’s support for the Kindle is missing one pretty big feature: the ability to assign a specific Instapaper folder to send to a Kindle. The only choice today is to feed “Read Later” to a Kindle. That’s great, if you only use Instapaper for articles you want to read later. But how many people actually use it that way? I feed all sorts of things into Instapaper. ...

I just found this gem in Vim’s help files. :help map-overview :nunmap can also be used outside of a monastery.

I recently wrote that iTerm is better than Terminal.app. Later that day, I received this reply on Twitter. @tangledhelix iTerm2 > iTerm –George Nachman (@gnachman) He was right. iTerm2 is a fork of the original iTerm project. By and large, they are the same, but iTerm2 has a considerable number of improvements. Here are a few. Smart cursor color This may seem minor, but it’s nice to have. iTerm2 watches the colors being displayed, and will adjust the cursor color to ensure it is fairly visible on the screen. ...