a) Persistent undo

Small but nevertheless very useful addition. Basically, your undo lists are dumped into undo files allowing you to undo/redo even if buffer is unloaded (or even if editor closed). Plus now you are able to undo even after buffer reload (this is separate feature actually).

To enable, add to your .vimrc:

set undofile
set undodir=/tmp

That will enable dumping undo lists into undofile, which will be located in /tmp folder.

b) Arbitrary columns

Main use for me is to highlight maximum line length. You could have similar functionality before, but now it is supported out of box:

" make sure that max lines are displayed
" (80 and 120 are from ZF Coding standards)
set colorcolumn=80,120

To update the color of the ruler use hl-ColorColumn. In our custom theme (based on wombat), I set color as:

hi ColorColumn guibg=#2d2d2d

c) Relative line numbers

Well, at first I though this kind of controversial feature, but once I tried to navigate inside document using it – I suppose I like this feature. In any case, not added to my .vimrc by default. I turn it manually:

:set rnu

and to get back to original line numbers:

:set nu

d) Conceal text

Well, this feature is mainly for syntax file writers, as it might make markup text more readable. I, honestly, haven’t enough incentive to dig into it any deeper, as I don’t really see how can I use it in my immediate work (I actually like to see all the markup).

Conclusion

Although 7.3 is a minor release, it is still the result of two-years of work, with a lot of issues fixed and several very cool additions.

Couple of notes on installation

On our 4C’s development server (running CentOS), I was able to compile 7.3 without any issues whatsoever.

While recently switching to Mac, I still program on my old Ubuntu box and updating the Vim installation didn’t work the first time I tried. I noticed that my Ubuntu installation needed xorg-dev and libgtk2.0-dev packages, once installed I was able to compile an complete the Vim’s installation.

Here is little script I use to compile and install Vim on CentOS (used it on Ubuntu as well):

#!/bin/bash
export CONF_OPT_GUI='--enable-gui=gtk2'
export CONF_OPT_PYTHON='--enable-pythoninterp'
export CONF_OPT_MULTIBYTE='--enable-multibyte'
export CONF_OPT_FEAT='--with-features=huge'
export CONF_OPT_COMPBY='--with-compiledby="yourname@here.com'

make distclean
./configure $CONF_OPT_FEAT $CONF_OPT_MULTIBYTE $CONF_OPT_PYTHON $CONF_OPT_COMPBY $CONF_OPT_GUI
make
make install

Save it into extracted vim73 directory (I prefer to use name “configure-my”), then simply source:

source configure-my

Hope that saves you some time and happy Viming!!

The good place to seek for fixes and workarounds is Vim Wikia, which not only shows you what to do, but also gives you a brief background on what is going on (if you are unaware).

I am generally happy with dos2unix utility to convert files, but sometimes it seems to be unable to fix the issue. In such situations I do a simple search/replace, right inside of Vim (in ex mode):

:%s/\r/\r/g

In my opinion it is real magic – it replaces carriage returns (CR) with line-feeds (LF), but the actual command reads: do a replacement of \r with \r, right?
Well, Vim is clever enough to look into file-type, and if it’s unix – it presumes that first \r can be either CR or LF, while second (replacement) is always LF

If it doesn’t work for you check your buffer’s file type:

:set ff?

I only recently moved to Vim, but start loving it for such small but extremely useful gems.

Should you have any questions/suggestions – hit me back on my tweeter.

Today, I needed to add SSL support to UMapper.com application running on my Slackware localhost. We use CA-signed certificates on our server, but for local box self-signed was quite enough (all I need is to be able to view development version of site via https). Here what I did:

1. Create private key:

$ openssl genrsa -out localhost.key 1024

2. Generate CSR (Certificate Signing Request):

$ openssl req -new -key localhost.key -out localhost.csr

3. Generate certificate:

$ openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in localhost.csr \
        -signkey localhost.key -out localhost.crt

4. Make sure SSL is enabled in httpd.conf:

# Following two should be uncommented
LoadModule ssl_module lib/httpd/modules/mod_ssl.so
Include /etc/httpd/extra/httpd-ssl.conf

5. Edit httpd-ssl.conf so that virtual host users your created certificate:

# locate and edit cert.details. Make sure localhost.crt and localhost.key
# are present (you either created them there or copied)
SSLCertificateFile "/etc/httpd/certs/localhost.crt"
SSLCertificateKeyFile "/etc/httpd/certs/localhost.key"

6. Restart apache:

$ apachectl restart

That’s it. Please note that browser would still generate exception (and it is a good thing, as otherwise certificates wouldn’t be that useful). All you need is to add your localhost as exception – since we really trust that details we provided during certificate creation are our own

P.S. If you are getting “[warn] _default_ VirtualHost overlap on port 443,
the first has precedence”, add NameVirtualHost *:443 into your httpd.conf

# aptitude install sysv-rc-conf
# sysv-rc-conf

From there just turn off apache service and press ‘q’ to quit. I really liked this nice command line tool!

apt-get install vsftpd

I further configured installed FTP server (/etc/vsftpd.conf):

anonymous_enable=NO # don't want anonymous access
pasv_enable=YES # enable passive mode
pasv_min_port=50000
pasv_max_port=50100
pasv_address=YOUR_INSTANCE_ASSOCIATED_IP
local_enable=YES # enable local users to login into system
write_enable=YES # enable local users to execute FTP write commands

Everything is pretty much simple, probably except for pasv ports. In a nutshell, passive mode means server handles which ports are used for data transfers, and we are using ports in range of 50000-50100. Now any system user should be able to login into your server via ftp. If you need further info regarding laying down the user accounts read my previous post.

One last thing – data ports should be accessible (which is obvious but I have spent half an hour figuring out why I can login via ftp, but cannot execute LIST command), so configure your authorization group accordingly:

ec2-authorize default -p 50000-50100 #open ports for default group

I hope it saves you some time.
Have a nice weekends!

If you need more info on how FTP functions here is good overview.


find . -type f -not -regex '.*/.svn/*.*'
-exec grep -Hn --colour 'SEARCH_STRING '{}' \;


You see, when you need to find some string within source files, and you don’t want to see duplicates coming from .svn folders, this one-liner does the trick – .svn directories are ignored from search.

To get rid of this issue, I used to install themes, or for applications other than Thunderbird just got used to their ugly look, but then yesterday I got Ubuntu 8.10 disc and my brother’s notebook. Combined, they demonstrated me one of the best out-of-box distributions, and you know what? GTK applications in there look really nice! That was a moment I realized that my Slackware shouldn’t be left behind (well, it took me only 2 months to figure that out – kudos!). The only thing that was required is to enable Xfce configuration:

$xfce-mcs-manager

Once typed into console, try to re-open one of your GTK2 applications – you should be amazed how ugly previous style was. If you don’t want to initialize Xfce manager manually on every login (and you don’t) you have to make sure that this command is invoked when your window manager launches. For me, I just put the xfce-mcs-manager command into .xsession file (depending on your configuration .xinitrc might also be an option).

Hope that saves you some time, and you’d be smarter than me

If you need more similar tips – make sure you read How to properly setup Slackware Linux!

UPD: Checkout xfce-setting-show if you want to manipulate Xfce settings.

So, when I wanted to edit newly downloaded e-book in pdf format (there were no bookmarks at all!), I scrattched my head, asked google and didn’t find anything suitable. Going a little deeper with the search I located very good program that does exactly what I need – it is able to add/delete/edit bookmarks of existing pdf files.

Program is called JPdfBookmarks, and it works like a charm (it even has a GUI version).

Для начала стоит создать нового пользователя, испольуя стандартные средства useradd:

useradd -d /home/ftp/myuser/ -s /dev/null myuser > /dev/null 2>&1

Домашней принята директория /home/ftp/myuser (в общем-то это стандартно), можно естественно использовать любую другую директорию, хотя лучше все же делать не извращаясь.

В большинстве случаев, доступ к шеллу должен быть закрытым для пользователя, поэтому мы использовали флаг “-s /dev/null”, т.е. как shell у пользователя будет использована псевдо-оболочка /dev/null. Стоит заметить, что у меня (на CentOS) подключиться через фтп удалось только при использовании /bin/false, /dev/null же перекрывал доступ как к шеллу, так и к фтп. В чем дело разбираться не захотел, возможно именно так это и должно работать на этой дистре (хотя в RedHat изначально добавленна псевдо-оболочка /dev/null в /etc/shells вроде как именно для этих целей).

После создания пользователя, задаем пароль:

passwd myuser

Далее, следует убедиться что /dev/null (в случае с CentOS /bin/false) присутсвуют в /etc/shells. Если наша псевдо-оболочка не найдена, добавляем ее.

И последнее, для удобства пользователя, заходящего через фтп, стоит по-определению открывать именно директорию его аккаунта. Как это сделать? ЛеХко! Для этого редактируем /etc/passwd:
вместо

myuser:x:10010:10010::/home/ftp/myuser/:/bin/false

вставляем

myuser:x:10010:10010::/home/ftp/./myuser/:/bin/false

таким образом при входе в систему, пользователь попадет в каталог myuser.

Вот, в общем-то, и все! Удачного начала рабочей недели.

svn propset svn:ignore *.pyc dirname

В случае если такое свойство уже существует:

svn propedit svn:ignore dirname

Например, на UMapper‘е для игнорирования авто-сгенеренных CAPTCHA файлов находящихся в каталоге /files/captcha и имеющих названия вида “cap_RANDOM_STRING”, я использовал следующую комманду:

svn propset svn:ignore cap_* /files/captcha/