Saturday, February 04, 2006
A Few Nerdy Notes (Ooo! Alliteration)
Categories: Technology
My weekend will be spent redesigning my site for The Expression Engine $15000 Shootout. Likelyhood that I will win? Not great. But $1,000 dollar grand prize sure would be nice and I have been wanting to redesign the site anyway.
For my recent jobs I have been doing a lot of coding work. That means I spend hours on end looking at XHTML, CSS, and PHP code in it's naked form. Not real pretty stuff. However, I have recently discovered three things have made that more enjoyable of late. First I have been using an incredible new text editor for macintosh called TextMate. Before this I did my coding in BBEdit which still has a place on my computer. BBEdit's search and search and replace functionality puts TextMate's to shame and I can't do without it when coding a large project. However, for everything else TextMate puts BBEdit to shame. It is hard to describe exactly how TextMate works so I think I will simply point to these videos of TextMate in action.
One of the great things about TextMate is it's flexibility in how to display the code. This brings me to the next two discoveries.
If you are staring at code all day it should look good right? Apparently I'm not the only one who agrees. I came across Bitstream Vera recently. Bitstream Vera is a free font that has a mono-spaced sans-serif version that was designed specifically for coding. It is both attractive and easy to read at small sizes. Not an easy to thing to do.
Finally, TextMate has the ability to allow you to customize how it colors the code. I have been using a customized version of this theme.
So there we have it. A nerdy post about making coding fun, or at least more enjoyable. Did you make it this far? :)
Posted by Jamie at 01:14 PM
comments
i made it through. :)
interesting stuff. didn’t understand it all, but what i did—i found useful. thanks!
good luck in the expression engine shootout.
Posted by joshua on February 06, 2006 at 12:55 PM