This got me wondering: “does Ruby have finalizers?”. It turns out it does in the form of ObjectSpace#define_finalizer. It’s worth mentioning that there are some tricks to using them which are nicely documented on Mike Perham’s blog here.

The gist of it is this: don’t create finalizers which hold a reference to the instance they’re finalizing or it just won’t work. I’m glad I found that blog post before I started coding because I would have certainly fallen into the trap he describes. It probably doesn’t help that the ruby doc examples don’t include any examples of adding a finalizer in a class definition.

So all of this works out pretty nicely and leaves me with code looking something like this:

defaults write nl.frim.GitX ApplePersistenceIgnoreState YES

I tweeted about this a while ago with appropriate credit to this tweet. But finding it again in my twitter stream was a pain so here it is for posterity.

I was in the middle of doing this today when I thought “man, it would be nice if I could hit Command+0 like in other apps and go back to the standard font size”. Then I realized I was using VIM and I could do that. So here ya go:

nnoremap :set guifont=Meslo\ LG\ M\ DZ:h10

Delightful.

Selecting lines for staging in GitX from Ed Schmalzle on Vimeo.

Installation

So lets start with the basics, installation.

brew install tmux

You can surely install this other ways, but using homebrew is super easy and you should be using it anyway.

Settling In

Like any tool there is some stuff that I got into the config file right away to make it feel more homey. First, I switched out the default command prefix C-b for C-a. From what I’ve read the only reason C-b is the default is so that it doesn’t conflict with scree. C-b is torture for your fingers though so there’s no reason to stick with that.

set-option -g prefix C-a

Next, because I use vim as my editor, I told tmux to us vi mode keys.

setw -g mode-keys vi

Finally, I setup some bindings so that I can move around splits using the vim movement keys.

bind h select-pane -L
bind j select-pane -D
bind k select-pane -U
bind l select-pane -R

That’s it. That’s everything in my ~/.tmux.conf right now. Like I said I just started with tmux so I’m sure my customizations will grow but as a vim user this is what I needed to make tmux feel more like home.

Basic Operation

As I got into using tmux there was definitely a point at which I learned just enough so that I was comfortable using it all the time and didn’t think to myself “Why am I using this, if I was using straight terminal I could do x so easily”.

Here’s the rundown of my most used commands…

Note: I use C-a in all the examples below, but if you have a different prefix set up substitute that for C-a.

Creating a new session from the command line:

tmux new -s my_session_name

Creating a new session from within a running session:

C-a :
new -s my_session_name

What’s cool here is that while in tmux you can hit C-a : and get a tmux command prompt and execute any of the normal tmux commands.

Attaching to running session:

tmux attach -t some_session_name

or if you know you only have one running session just:

tmux attach

Creating new windows while in a session:

C-a c

Naming your current window

C-a ,

Switching sessions:

C-a s

Entering copy-mode:

C-a [

A note on copy-mode… I kind of think of this as entering normal mode in vim.Being in copy mode allows you to move around the terminal just like normal mode in vim. To be honest, I’m pretty sure I’m not using copy-mode to it’s full potential yet. I mainly use it to scroll up to see things that have gone out of view in my terminal window.

Jason’s instructions tell us to install the “hanna” template via gem install mislav-hanna which is out of date, so we will use the most current instructions from the gems github page to install the template. No big deal, just drop the github username from the gem install command like this…

The “hanna” template absolutely kills the default rdoc template. You’ve probably seen it around being used by various projects and there’s no reason not to use it locally.

Next I updated my .gemrc to ignore ri and to use the “hanna” template for rdocs.

Finally I re-generated my rdocs by running:

I ignored the rest of the steps in the aforementioned post as I don’t really feel the need to be running a passenger instance just to serve rubygems docs. I generally just run gem server whenever I need to access my local docs.

My solution is barely more than what you get out of the box with rubygems but with just a few changes I find myself much happier with my local docs.

Before & After Readability:

1. You want to deploy a Sinatra application with Passenger on Dreamhost
2. You’re using a Dreamhost shared hosting account
3. You’re application relies on gems that aren’t installed globally on Dreamhost
4. You’ve got the gems you need installed locally like this

Then you’ll want to include something like this in your rackup file:

This will make sure your locally installed gems will be available to your application. Maybe my google skills are getting rusty, but it took me a while to find this solution. Here’s the original source.