Power Charging your Mac for development: Finder, Sublime Text, Zsh

Here are some tips I shared during my General Assembly Ruby On Rails class, to make your Mac better for coding development

1. Finder

1.1 Setting Finder shortcut to a "projects" folder

since we travel a lot between different project, download, application folders during our coding exercises, it is better to organize all our code in a coding folder (I call it "projects" with subfolders named after the project / organization names)
and to speed up the travelling even faster, I add my projects folder shortcut to the Finder favourites.

1.2 Use Path Finder

if you are willing to pay, there is one Finder alternative called "Path Finder" which provides more file management features and more friendly to users familiar with Windows operating system.

2. Personalize Sublime Text

2.1 Sublime Text Command Line shortcut

we always navigates between Terminal (or iTerm) and Finder (or Path Finder)
so, being able to open the current Terminal project in Sublime Text is a huge speedup

http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/osx_command_line.html

2.2 Sublime Text Package Control

There are lots of wonderful plugins being developed by other talented people, setting up Package Control enables you to search and install them with few keystrokes

http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/package_control/installation

2.3 Sublime Text Plugin: Sidebar Enhancement

After setting up Package Control, the first plugin I recommend you to install is Sidebar Enhancement
- Open up Command Palette by pressing Apple + Shift + P
- Open up Package Control by typing Install Package and click Enter
- type SidebarEnhancement and click Enter
- after installing successfully (status message at the bottom of Sublime Text), restart Sublime Text completely (Quit and Open, not just close the current window editor)

2.4 Format your code nicely with spaces

use 2 spaces instead of tab
http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/indentation.html

2.5 Remove trailing whitespace after save automatically

http://blog.nategood.com/sublime-text-strip-whitespace-save

3. use Zsh for terminal shell

You can type less characters to execute commands. Zsh is also smart enough to correct your typo and suggest correct commands and arguments

https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh



Happy Coding !