eriksmartt.com/blog

terminal defaults

Here’s a couple settings I find particularly helpful when working in the Terminal on OS X. The first turns on case-insesitive tab completion (for bash at least, I haven’t tried it in other shells.) The second turns on Focus Follow Mouse for the Terminal only. While the Terminal’s in the foreground, it will have focus regardless of mouse position, but with this setting, you can send key events to a Terminal window that isn’t in the foreground by hovering the mouse cursor over the Terminal window.

echo "set completion-ignore-case On" >> ~/.inputrc

(via Case insensitive completion in 10.3)

defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES

(via Switch Terminal window focus with mouse movement)

Both of these are still working for me in 10.4.

Moleskine Memo Pocket

My second lifehack tip is for storing receipts while traveling on business. My solution is the Moleskine Memo Pocket book. Unlike the other Moleskin’s, which you can actually write in, this tiny book only has pockets (six, actually.)

At the end of each day I put all of my receipts into a pocket in the Moleskine. If I’m traveling for under a week, I use a different pocket per-day. For heavier traveling, I use one pocket per-week, or per-city. And even though the book is small, you can jam a whole lot of paper in there and still close it!

Lifehack entry number one

In the lifehacker spirit of sharing tips and tricks that help simplify one’s daily routine, I’ve added a lifehack category to my blog. For the first entry I thought I’d start with this super simple shell function I have in my .bash_profile to make a time-stamped copy of a file. Before writing this, if I wanted to edit a config file I would generally make a copy and append ‘.old’ to the file name. However, the next time you want to change it you’re stuck wasting time figuring out what to name the next revision. To address that, this function adds a shell command called ‘bak’ that will make a quick copy of a file and add a date-stamp to the file name.

function bak {
  TIMESTAMP=`date "+%y%m%d_%H%M"`
  cp $1 $1.$TIMESTAMP
}