With many webapps depending on environmental vars for things like authentication and environment-specific config, it can be a pain to get those vars setup on a local dev machine. A common pattern is to provide a default when the variable is missing.

I like to avoid putting passwords in source code, so I went searching for a way to auto-setup the vars upon entering a directory in terminal. After a hint at chpwd from #zsh I landed on wayneeseguin's gist serving that very purpose. I forked it to add a tiny improvement based on another suggestion from the #zsh folks, and ended up with this simple solution in my ~/.zshrc.

Now I can toss a .set_env in any directory, add it to .gitignore and have a quick, clean way of setting up my ENV.

Alfred is an excellent OS X utility that lets you launch apps, run quick searches, control itunes and more. I frequently look up docs on jQuery's API so rather than typing "jquery nth-child" in Google then clicking the first result, I wired up an Alfred Custom Search to pull up Google's first result when I type jq [search term].

Search URL: http://www.google.com/search?btnI=1&q=site:http://api.jquery.com/+{query}

Now when I type jq not in Alfred, I land on http://api.jquery.com/not-selector/

I recently discovered the most excellent tmux:

tmux is a terminal multiplexer: it enables a number of terminals (or windows), each running a separate program, to be created, accessed, and controlled from a single screen. tmux may be detached from a screen and continue running in the background, then later reattached.

I dabbled with screen previously but abandon it because it didn't actually improve my workflow much over Terminal.app's tabs. tmux, however, supports horizontal and vertical splits! This allows me to work the same way on terminal that I do in vim.

I ripped some pieces from various configs around the net:

It is the customer who determines what a business is. It is the customer alone whose willingness to pay for a good or a service converts economic resources into wealth, things into goods.

Peter Drucker

Often when editing an old file it's useful to re-tab the document based on your current preferences.  My current vim tabbing preferences are:

Based on this, I was able to very easily fix an entire document using :retab. I was happy to find I didn't need to install yet another plugin to do this.

Read more at: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Converting_tabs_to_spaces

I build a lot of sites for a lot of different clients and have been perfecting my directory structure over the last few years. Because I heavily rely on Terminal to work on projects, I need very fast access requiring little thought to my project directories. At the same time I need projects organized by client so I use this rather obvious structure (these are not my actual clients—I wish!):

Keeping directory names lowercase and avoiding spaces makes for easier tab-completion on terminal.

Even so, typing cd ~/work/rivendell_bicycle_works/rivendell.com (albeit only actually typing cd ~/wo[tab]/riv[tab]/riv[tab]) is too much work when my mind is full of code and I need to get somewhere quick on a new terminal.

Enter aliasing. Aliasing allows me to open a new terminal and type cd riv[tab] and find myself in ~/work/rivendell_bicycle_works/rivendell.com. To facilitate this surprisingly useful ability, I setup an alias at the start of each new project.

When I no longer need quick access to a project, I can just delete the alias to keep my home directly clean(ish).

In trying to standardize my deployment process for client sites, I'm now using Capistrano to deploy all sites. This includes both rails and non-rails. I built the recipe around a WordPress deployment on a MediaTemple (dv) but it should be abstract enough to serve as a base for future sites.

Inspired by this post at GitHub.