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 !