Quickly add task or note…

…using this simple setup.

I often send myself notes and todos. I’m not really GTD person but I feel that ability to capture a thought or remind myself to go back to some task while interrupted is very important. But it has to be instantaneous process in order to be effective. I want to hit some keys combination and start typing what I have in mind.

I think that the best tool to initiate that process is some application launcher. I personally use Launchy but there’s a ton of similar apps in the internet. So let’s take baby steps here. Have something to write down? Hit Alt+Space, type note, hit enter and you’ll have new notepad window ready for you.

That’s nice but far from ideal. First you need to save it somewhere or you’ll eventually loose it. Where will you save it? What name will you give to your note? Will you find it later? Nah… Let’s do something about it.

Second step would be to use Launchy to email yourself. See this lifehacker post for details. That’s a neat solution. Instead of typing note to launch notepad, you type tome, hit tab, write anything you want, hit enter and Bam! You just mailed yourself a note. No saving required, no decision to make and you’ll eventually check your inbox, right?

Third step is to use some todo/GTD tool. All good apps have some email address that captures your messages and adds it automatically to your workspace/notebook/etc. It can also often understand some basic commands you include in the subject line, for example @work will add your note to a notepad called work, #recipe will give your note a hash tag, etc. I highly recommend that approach. Try it and see if it works for you.

If you’re not using text expansion…

.. you’re doing it wrong!

I’m serious. Think about it. You’re a developer. You work on a project that requires credit card input. How many times did you enter some fake card number since last Monday? How many times did you typed “please let me know if you have any more questions” in your correspondence with clients for the last week? More than three times? Time to get a text expansion tool.

You probably need to find your ultimate tool for yourself but let me recommend two tools to start with. First is Texter by Adam Pash. It is dead simple – type in a phrase, figure out a shortcut, set up a trigger.

For keyboard ninjas I recommend AutoHotKey. It is much more than a text expansion tool. It is a macro host that can do incredible things with your windows box, so setting up a text expansion may be just a start of the journey. To give you a tip: to create new text expanding macro, add a similar line to you AHK script:

::gml::pxxxxxxxxxxx@gmail.com

Have fun with texting!

XML formatting and indenting made easy…

…with free firstobject XML editor

I work with with XML a lot. Mostly via frameworks, APIs and high level tools, but every once in a while I need to get my hands dirty with raw XML. To get anything from it, I need two things: I need it displayed in a human readable way and I need the structure (nodes, nesting, etc.)

Firstobject XML editor takes care of both tasks flawlessly. Just paste any valid XML into the main editor window and hit F8. Did I mention it’s free?

Best windows command prompt replacement…

is Console2.

We all know where windows command prompt falls short. Fixed size window, ugly design, lack of tabs, problems with copy and paste – to name a few. Fortunately there is a great alternative. Console2 is great open source program that does everything what cmd.exe does but better.

I will not write yet another Console2 guide, there are plenty of those in the webz, for example: the great Console2 walkthrough from Scott H. There are, however, two things about his tool that you might want to learn about. First, there is that “save settings to user directory” setting, that often confuses people. Second, it is worth to point out that Console2 can be set up as the host not only for cmd.exe proces but also for powershell, cygwin, git bash console and others. You’ll find receipes for that below.

So what is the deal with save settings to user directory?

With that setting turned off, Console2 will save its configuration in the XML file placed in the same location where the Console2 binary is. If you turn that on, the XML will be placed in the c:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData folder. Why is that important? Well, if you have multiple Consoles, each set up to work with a different command line, you want that setting turned off. If turned on, no matter which instance you run, c:\console.exe will work exactly the same as c:\tmp\console.exe, because it will use the configuration from the same place. You should also turn it of if you sync your console across many computers with dropbox, like I do.

And here’s how you can configure Console2 to run other command line tools.

Use the following values for Shell:

Cygwin - C:\opt\cygwin\bin\bash.exe --login -i
PowerShell - %SystemRoot%\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe
GitBash - C:\Windows\SysWOW64\cmd.exe /c ""C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\bin\sh.exe" --login -i"
VS2010 command prompt - %comspec% /k ""C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\vcvarsall.bat"" x86

Annoying Chrome ctrl+TAB order…

… can be fixed by this great add-on: Recent Tabs.

For me, the default ctrl+TAB behavior is one of the biggest annoyances in Chrome browser. It simply cycles through all your open tabs, from first to last, and doesn’t care which is more recent than the other.

Fortunately, there’s an add-on for that. Recent Tabs Chrome extension binds to ctrl+Q keyboard shortcut (closest thing to ctrl+TAB I guess) and displays a little popup, where you can easily cycle through your open tabs, as you would do in alt+TAB windows switcher, for instance. It made my day!

Command prompt…

… here, now!

Just a quick tip for today. Did you know that you can quickly open a command prompt window in the current folder (while browsing in windows explorer), by typing cmd in the address bar?

Cygwin tail…

…sux!

If you want to have a stream of a recent additions to some file in unix/linux, you should run

tail -f /some/file

to get it. Tail will show whatever has been added to the file, in real-time. This is especially handy for watching logs.

Unfortunately, if you try the same thing in windows running cygwin, you’ll be surprised. Tail in cygwin blocks! Other processes are not able to add something to the file that is watched by tail. Don’t worry though, there’s an app for that and it is called PowerShell

Get-Content c:\temp\logs\some.log -wait

and Voilla!

How to make your tail look as awesome as my? Get Console2, which I will cover in one of the next posts.