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The Prompt

The prompt is one of the first customizations that many people make. The default prompt isn’t informative. You’re given no information of where you are in the filesystem (ie your directory structure) or a clear idea of which user you’re operating under.

The code to make this happen is segmented for readability and easy updating (I’m a fickle user, what can I say?).

# Prompt Colors
BGREEN='\[\033[1;32m\]'
GREEN='\[\033[0;32m\]'
BRED='\[\033[1;31m\]'
RED='\[\033[0;31m\]'
BBLUE='\[\033[1;34m\]'
BLUE='\[\033[0;34m\]'
NORMAL='\[\033[00m\]'
PS1="${BLUE}(${NORMAL}\w${BLUE}) ${NORMAL}\u${BLUE}@\h${RED}\$ ${NORMAL}"

A bit of translation, the weird character combinations are what it takes to tell your terminal (the black window) how to make colors. the \w’s and such, are the values you wish to show in your prompt. A complete list of these values can be found in your bash man pages or here<>, as the bash man page is rather long (but informative!).

The Output

Navigating around your filesystem with screenfuls of grey text is a quick way to get a headache. If you want to get work done, however, adding a bit of color coding can make things much easier. Bash takes this into account with the LSCOLORS environment variable. Represented in foreground/background color pairs, there are 11 values (for a total of 22 characters) which make up how your terminal outputs the color.

The designations for color and the order they go in can be seen in the man page for ls or here<>. With an LSCOLORS variable of ‘Gxfxcxdxdxegedabagacad’, we can go from drab and grey, to informative and colorful.

So our .bash_profile file can be seen below or you can download it here<>.

# Better looking ls output export LSCOLORS='Gxfxcxdxdxegedabagacad'

# Prompt Colors
BGREEN=’\[\033[1;32m\]‘
GREEN=’\[\033[0;32m\]‘
BRED=’\[\033[1;31m\]‘
RED=’\[\033[0;31m\]‘
BBLUE=’\[\033[1;34m\]‘
BLUE=’\[\033[0;34m\]‘
NORMAL=’\[\033[00m\]‘

# Prompt definition
PS1=”${BLUE}(${NORMAL}\w${BLUE}) ${NORMAL}\u${BLUE}@\h${RED}\$ ${NORMAL}”


Next in the series, I’ll walk though some of the alias I have setup which make life easier.

NERDtree

The NERDtree plugin functions much the same way that TM’s project drawer works. It allows a heirarchal view of a folder structure. From this view, you can open files in new tabs, in the opposite window, even in split views. The only downside I’ve come across yet is the inability to perform file operations from within NERDtree. That being said, TM’s implementation of this was always felt a bit wonky to me as well.

NERD_commenter

Also from the NERD family, the commenting tool is surprisingly useful. To comment out large portions of code, you just have to select it in visual mode and hit the default binding ,cc and it comments out the current line or current selection.

ColorSchemes

Decent color schemes are also something that’s pretty important to me. The aesthetic of a good color scheme makes hours of staring at code a little bit easier. I’m currently using Brookstream (top), a teal, blue and purple color scheme set to a black background. When not in GUI mode, I use elflord (bottom) who’s pastel colors are passable for console work.

LodgeIt

LodgeIt is one of my favorite plugins by far. Its a simple pastebin service that’s hooked into vim. With a quick execution of the ,p command, my current selection or entire file is uploaded to the pasting service and the url is copied to my clipboard (mac feature). This makes debugging and getting help from someone on IRC super easy.

Snippets Emu

Similar to all of the great bundles of TM fame, snippetsEmu provides intelligent command completion. It has bundles for several major programming frameworks/languages. Most importantly, at least for me, it has support for Django.

Taglist

Taglist is one of the key features that people from Eclipse, Komodo, and that ilk always proclaim as awesomesauce. Its the ability to list all of the classes in your code, their methods and various other bits. It will also keep a history of recently accessed files and their methods in handy vim code folding.

VCS Command

VCS Command is one of those plugins that isn’t super exciting. It doesn’t have the flash and glam that the other plugins have. What it does, however, keep your alt+tab fingers happy. I have rebound the aliases (as they conflict with NERD_commenter) to handle status, diffs and log commands. I prefer to be a bit more careful when commiting to repos, so I keep that a terminal only affair.

SCM Diff

Tied in with VCS Command, SCM Diff shows you visually how your current file differs from the previous versions of the file. With a simple ,d (which I chose to remap) I can see an inline diff, as you can see to the right, of my current file. Quite handy!

Caveats

So there is a thing or two I should mention about this particular setup. First, multiple windows. With NERDtree and Taglist fighting or which window is which, I’ve had to resort to toggling them on and off. Not such a big deal, as it gives me more code real estate, but something that I should mention.

What I’m looking for now

Django Management Commands! I’m really hoping some friendly programmer will create a method to run Django’s runserver, syncdb, flush, and the rest of their friends from Vim. If no one steps up to that plate, I may have to be that guy.

See something I’m missing? Is there a big piece of functionality my setup doesn’t provide? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

The syntax I’m considering for the simple model is:

{% gencal for Base.Model on date_field in DateObject %}

The grammatical words aren’t set in stone by any means. Jannis, for instance, thinks I shouldn’t use the `in` keyword as its used in other portions of the template language. This would allow someone to quickly and easily create a generic calendar for an object without a big investment. From a syntax standpoint, it also makes it much easier to set up.

The downside of this approach is your calendar will only hold one object (which is probably just fine for most people). The second option is mostly what I’m doing now. Generate a list of objects to map and pass them into the template. There is some documentation work that needs to be done on this front, which I’ll be doing as I use gencal in an upcoming project. 

Also speaking of choices, I’m looking to create two different default templates. One which will include a detailed listing of what’s going on in a month (similar to iCal) and another which will tell you if there is an event on a specific day (typically seen by bolding the day). The first one would be a large calendar (700px ish), while the second would be much smaller (100px-ish). Interested to hear your thoughts on these proposed changes as I look to make improvements to gencal this week.