Sanity, Inc.

Recently I've been on a hacking high, touching a lot of code, and in touch with a lot of cool programmers. In retrospect I'm surprised at the variety of stuff I've been doing, so I thought I'd write a short list.

Prolific Japanese hacker Daisuke Murase (a.k.a. typester) has recently patched Cocoa Emacs to add a full-screen display mode. Here's how to add this must-have feature into your own local Emacs tree while you wait for it to get integrated into the official Emacs sources.

When Rails prints a backtrace in HTML, it's helpfully rendered as a "txmt:" link so that users can click open the corresponding location in TextMate on OS X. If you're an Emacs user, here's how to make those URLs open in Emacs instead.

From time to time I receive bug reports for the libraries I've written. Some reports describe genuine bugs (and I'll be the first to admit I'm not perfect), but far too many others demonstrate a missed step in the submitter's "bug assessment" mental process.

Here's a neat Ruby trick for fans of Symbol#to_proc.

Wonderful things happen when smart people discard limitations that everyone else has been taking for granted, and two recent examples in the online world illustrate this beautifully.

Ever quickly sent a skype message, only to immediately notice a typo? You can fix it using the following trick.

'less' is a great tool for browsing Rails log files, though you might not guess it if you try to view your "development.log" with it.

I often hear the proponents of vim and emacs discussing which is better, usually pitting emacs' extensibility against vi's archaic yet arguably effective and tendon-friendly scheme of editing modes.

But why choose?

Our big celebrity charity news site runs on Rails, and I've just switched all the view code from erb to haml. I cut the total number of lines of view code from 2370 to 1788, which makes for a saving of 25%.