Freebies

I write lots of code, for lots of reasons. From time to time, I'll write something that might be of use to others, so I'll put it here. I don't have the time and energy to set up a Sourceforge account for each one, or the interest in wading through license decisions for each one. So here they are. Public domain. If you can use them, great. But if they eat your children or set fire to you mother's collection of erotic tea cozies, don't blame me.

I use Linux as my OS-of-choice and I love the command line, but I do hate typing in long directory paths, as I leap from one project to another in a single bound. That's where JMarks (zip file (2.01 KiB)) come in. This is a simple macro for the bash shell that does two things:

j -m foo

will create a record in ~/.jmarks identifying the current directory path with the label 'foo'

j foo

will cd directly to the directory you've previously labeled as 'foo'

So when you find yourself typing “cd /some/long/path/Class208/Assign3” for the eleventh time, just do a “j -m 208-3” on the next line. Then the next time “j 208-3” will get you where you're going in a fraction of the time.

2010-11-27: Version 0.2 released - added statistics reporting feature and fixed download file

I'm a writer, of sorts, and given the opinions I've expressed elsewhere, it may not surprise anybody to learn that I don't use a word processor. Nope. I grew up using vim, and in my academic research into creativity, I've developed a powerful appreciation for tools that stay the hell out of my way. Writing has nothing to do with font selection, colours, indentation and so on - at least, not during the frantic, frustrating and time consuming early phases of the first three or four drafts. All I need for most of the life of a project is the ability to indicate where the paragraphs start and end, and maybe the occasional italic or bold emphasis - but even those are used sparingly.

For many years, I've been working with a very limited text markup system that I invented myself, based on the conventions from the old typewritten manuscript days: underscores around italic passages, and asterisks around bold ones. I had my own little script that would transform those directly into PDF files for printing and submitting to publishers. Recently, however, I've discovered John Gruber's markdown system, which takes the same approach as my personal scheme, but is much more widely supported.

One thing that has always been missing, with either system, was the ability to view my work-in-progress in its final, rendered form. I don't need this often, but sometimes it's just nice to look at how much you've achieved in a piece, and nothing says that better than a rendered page. So, taking advantage of the growing gaggle of markdown tools out there, I built markwatch - a python-based file viewer for markdown files that shows your content in its rendered HTML form. What makes markwatch different from other such viewers, however, is that it monitors your markdown file and updates the view any time you make a change to the source. I have a hot-key in my vim setup that launches markwatch on the current file. Once its running, every time I save the file, markwatch updates the display.

Now I have the best of both worlds - a fast, powerful, and responsive editor under my fingers, and window into the WYSIWYG form of my output. It might not be for everyone, but if it sounds like something you would use, feel free. You can download it here (2.28 KiB).

2010-11-26: Version 0.1 released